Tracy Williams

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Rosa Rojas: Today is August 25, 2010. My name is Rosa Rojas, and I will be interviewing, can you please state your full name and spell it, for the record.
Tracy Williams: Tracy, no middle initial, Williams. T-R-A-C-Y, Williams, W-I-L-L-I-A-M-S.
R: Of the U.S. Army, and do you want to expand on what you mentioned before?
W: Oh, I was just saying that I’m in the army, but for people that like to distinguish between active duty, reserves, National Guard, those other categories within the army—so I was just being a little more specific—that I’m in the army reserves. In short, active duty, those are people that work full time; that’s all they do. Army reserves, these are people that have a fulltime civilian job, and they are in the military—they are in the army part time. These are the people that, when we go to war, and active duty can’t complete the mission, they call up the reserves. So that’s like reinforcement force, if you will. When they need extra people.
R: Have you ever been in active duty, or have you been reserve the entire time?
W: I have always been army reserves. I graduated college in 1989 and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1990, and I started my career. So all of my deployments, everything I've done, has been in the reserves. Then I had an additional job in addition to being in the military.
R: We’ll get back to that. I need to say that this interview is being conducted at the Ohio Historical Center in Columbus, Ohio, and it is part of an oral history project by the Ohio Historical Society to preserve the stories and experiences of people in the service and their family members for future generations. Tell us about your background—where were you born and when where did you grow up?
W: I am originally from Chicago; I grew up in Chicago and Gary, Indiana. I went to college at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, where I was a double major in journalism [and] speech communication. I graduated from there and started life. I was commissioned as a second lieutenant, like I said. I was commissioned in 1989, but because I finished in December, my degree is not stamped until the following year. So commissioned in ’89, graduated in 1990 is what my degree says, but actually finished in ’89. And then, pretty much started my career from there. My first deployment occurred in 1990, Desert Storm. And that’s kind of the start of it. I’m the oldest of two. Journalism, I had plans that I would be the next Oprah Winfrey. That didn’t happen, so here I am now as Tracy Williams. I actually got a chance to go to Oprah’s show; I was going to ask if I could replace her when she goes off the air, but I had attitude that day, so I didn’t get a chance to talk to her.
R: You were in the audience?
W: Yes, I was in the audience. So yeah, I deployed in 1990, participated, but if you recall, that war was short, so I was only deployed for a little over three months. After that experience, I was like “Man, if I could do this; if I could go to war, I could do anything.” But I ended up, once we got called up, I ended up being called up stateside at Fort Benning, and so then I decided to pursue my Master’s degree after that. So my background on the civilian side is in higher education. Once I did that, then I went back to school, started working on my Master’s degree, and I could go on and on and on, but that’s the start.
R: Two questions—what does stateside mean, please? State that for our audience.
W: It means that even though I was called up during Desert Storm, I did not go overseas. The unit that I was with, I ended up going to Fort Benning, Georgia, and the troops and the soldiers that we were training—our mission was to train soldiers so had there been a high casualty rate, the soldiers that we were training would have been the next group of people into Iraq; they would then deployed overseas. It’s all about what type of unit you're with, and I happened to be with a drill sergeant unit at that time. I was like, “Who knows Muncie, Indiana is even on the map?” I mean, my goodness, I never thought that I’d get called up. My mom was like, “Tell them you're gay. Tell them you're gay!” She just did not want me to have to deploy. I was like, “Mom, I can’t tell them I’m gay.” ‘Cause at that time, okay, I’m really telling my age now. At that time, if you were gay, you were not permitted or allowed to serve in the military. And it was actually a question that they would ask you on the survey and on the questionnaire. It was something that people took very serious. The recruiter was asking me the questions, and one of the questions was, was I gay or homosexual—I forget how he worded it. I was like, “Yeah, right. Mhm. Yeah, I’m gay.” No smile, no anything. He’s like, “Seriously.” I’m like, “No, I’m not.” So my mom knew that if I told them that I was gay that that would be a way for me to not have to deploy. I was like, I can’t tell them I’m gay, not even to get out of going overseas. I just wouldn’t do it ‘cause then I thought, I couldn’t lie, and I thought, later on, how am I then going to undo it and say, “I’m really not gay; I just said that so I wouldn’t have to deploy.” Sorry, mom.
R: Okay, and then your master’s was in…
W: My Master’s was from Ball State University, and it’s in—this is a mouthful: Student Personnel and Administration Higher Education. It’s basically a degree to work in higher education and support services—admissions, financial aid, career services, so on and so forth. So not the teaching side of working at colleges and universities, but the administrative support side. My background happens to have been in admissions, but it was a degree that I could have worked in any support area at colleges and universities.
R: So how did you end up in the military?
W: Well, I’m a first generation college student, so no one in my family had ever gone to college; I was going to be the first. But we didn’t have any money; we didn’t have a plan. When I got to college, my meal ticket was being withdrawn because the bill hadn’t been paid, and it was just a struggle financially. My parents, though both of them were working, they were not good managers of money and had not saved any money. I had to come up with a plan. Like, okay, I want to do this; what’s the plan? Well my parents had not filed taxes, so I couldn’t even get financial aid and all that good stuff, so my plan was, “I know what I can do. I’ll become a resident assistant.” That’s working at the college in the dormitories. That will give me my room and board, and I’ll join the military, and that will give me—I could be in the reserves, and I get E5 pay, so that gives me the chance to skip levels one through four and get E5 pay. And I was in ROTC, and at the time, they give you a hundred dollars a month, and that was a whole lot of money back then. It seemed like it anyway. So I was like, “Okay. I’ll just do this so that I can get the money for college.” So it was never my intention to stay beyond my initial commitment. That was the start of it. The other thing is my mom had been in the army reserves. In fact, I should have brought you a picture of my mom when she was in the military. I’m going to one day have it framed with when she was in and then a picture of me and try to put them side by side. My mom was like, “You should join the reserves and talk to a recruiter.” I really didn’t want to do it, but I did it just to get my mom to stop nagging me about it, and it stuck. Here I am now, twenty-three years later, still doing it. I did it to help finance my way through college because I wanted to graduate from college and be debt free. I didn’t want all this debt. That was the plan, to combine those two things.
R: Did it work?
W: It worked. I graduated debt free. I was a double major, like I said. I graduated in four years and one semester. It was a good plan in writing, and I stuck to the plan. The other reason why I joined was because I thought, “You know? Where else could you go—?” I would be like twenty-three years old when I graduated and already in a supervisor position. I thought, “Where else could I go at that age and be in a supervisor position?” Often times, the people I was supervising were older than I was, more knowledgeable than I, so I thought that would be pretty cool. I was like, “That’d be something I could put on my resume.” You're always thinking about, “Okay, what could I do that will give myself an extra step over the next guy or girl?” when you're graduating. And I thought, “Well, I'm not exceptionally good looking, I’m not exceptionally bright, and I’m not exceptionally rich,” so I needed another, and that was it.
R: Did that serve you well?
W: It did. It served me well. I don’t know where else I could go and make the kind of money that I make and the benefits I have and it be legal. So it turned out to be a good combination, because what I really found is that the skills that I've been able to acquire in the military are good transferrable skills no matter what you want to do in life. So being in the military has kind of enhanced whatever it is I wanted to do, personally or professionally. It turned out to be a good plan. A huge sacrifice, one which a lot of people don’t want to make, but it was worth it.
R: Okay, we’ll get into the sacrifice part later on in the interview, but I want to stick with asking you about then your career because you said the Reserve is for people that also have a fulltime job back at home, so what is that?
W: My fulltime career—well, like I said, my background is working at colleges and universities; I started out at Ball State University when I was working on my master’s. Actually, I really started when I was an undergrad, because like I said, I worked as a resident assistant, so I was like, “Okay, I kind of like this and some of the benefits.” Because back then, you could do resident life, and you could have your own apartment in the university. If you could imagine how much money you would save if you didn’t have to pay rent—utilities, phone, cable, those types of things. But I didn’t go that route; I ended up in admissions and so I think after I graduated from Ball State, my first job shortly after was working on my Master’s was at Earlham College, so I worked at Earlham College. I've been at IUPUI (Indiana University / Purdue University – Indianapolis), Butler University, different types of schools: small privates, selective liberal arts colleges.
R: In admissions?
W: Mhm.. So just some variety there. Once I got married—I met my husband in the military, so that was another good reason–I'm glad I joined the military; I might still be single otherwise. But I met my husband in Germany during a deployment, and then I moved to Ohio, and since then, I’ve been so incredibly busy with military and just a lot of other personal things that I have not gone back to work full time in terms of colleges and universities. I just have some other things that I'm working on. Financial type stuff—a lot of other things have been very rewarding and pretty fulfilling. Like I said, the military right now has just been consuming so much of my time because sometimes I'm away from home like six months at a time, so it would be very difficult to keep a civilian job being away for six months here, a year there—that kind of thing. I put the pause button on my civilian career until I can either retire or slow down what I'm doing in the military.
R: How far off is it for your retirement?
W: Oh, I can retire now. You only have to have twenty years, and I got my twenty year letter. I'm at twenty-three years now, and I'm seriously contemplating retirement. I'm thinking I might stop at twenty-five years. I don’t know; we’ll see. My husband is in Afghanistan right now, so we’ll talk about it once he gets back because the deployments, they take a lot out of you. We’ll see.
R: Can we talk a little about how you met your husband, you met him in Germany?
W: Yes, I met him in Germany during a deployment in 2003. We met, and of course, when I'm in my uniform and my work mode, I'm not thinking personal, so he was just Major Williams. So what? He’s 6’6”, three hundred pounds, dark chocolate—I mean, I call him my mister Mandingo man; he looks like he just got off a boat from Africa. We met, and he asked me, “Hey, what are you looking for in a husband?” And I said, “Well,” I really hadn’t thought about it, but I can wing things pretty good, so I just came up with like seven things. And oddly enough, about three weeks later, he came back to me and showed me proof about how he met all seven of those requirements. I was like, hoo, I got to sit up and pay attention. You know, because I'm thinking…
R: Wow. How long had you known him at that point?
W: A minute, maybe. Probably less than three months or something around there, and when he showed me the proof—like I had on there, finances. He showed me his W2, showed me the little thing you get from the social security office on how much you’re going to make when you are sixty-five, seventy. He was like, “I’m going to show you something, not to impress you, but to show you that I'm bringing something to the table other than paper plates and napkins.” I was like, alrighty then. I looked at it, and I was like, “Oh, okay.”
R: You’re credentials are in order, there.
W: Right, I thought, “Did I tell you I don’t want to work?” Anyways, education: he’s like, “I have a Bachelor’s degree in this, I have a Master’s degree in this.” Christianity. Actually, that was first on my list. He’s like, “I’m a member of St. Mark AME Church and I serve,” told me what positions he held at the church. He just went down the whole list. Family: “I’m the oldest of eight, and here’s what I do for my family, and blah blah blah.” I’m like, “Man this guy’s serious,” so once he finished, I thought, I really wasn’t looking at him like dating him, but I thought, “Well, now you’re forcing me to have to pay attention to you because you meet all seven of my requirements.” You know? But I was single, and I loved being single. I could have stayed single forever. I was like “Doggone it, now I really got to pay attention.” It was really funny. So he was actually leaving, going off to Kosovo, which was much more dangerous. Where I was, was not dangerous at all because I was in Germany. But where he was going was a lot more austere. I said, “Hey. Whatever you do, don’t give your roommates your ATM card,” because I knew his roommates, and I knew—I wouldn’t want to tell them what I knew about them on camera, but anyway, I knew they were not to be trusted. So he gives me his ATM card, and then gives me the pin number. And I'm thinking, “I've only known this guy, at that point, maybe thirty some days,” and I thought, “No way. No way. Nobody is that retarded enough to give you their pin number and the number to it.” So I’m bee bopping around Germany one day, and I don’t have anything to do, so I put it in the ATM machine, and I put in the pin number; I’ll never forget. The pin was Godd, G-O-D-D. And it took; well you know, since I was there, I had to see how much money was in there. Doot doot doot doot. Once I saw how much money, you know how in the cartoons where your eyes go “dow, shirrrr,” I was like, “Oh, I better go put this in a safe place.” So I did, and the next time I saw him, which like I said was probably about three months later, I like hit him upside the head, “Don’t you ever give anyone access to all your money. Are you crazy? You don’t know me like that.” And he looked at me, he said, “Discernment.” I’m like, “Discernment?” Discernment is a word that usually you will read in the bible. So as soon as he said it, it was a word I associated with the bible. He said, “Discernment. God had already revealed to me that you're not that kind of woman.” And he’s right, because I don’t know you, but if you gave me a million dollars, and you came back a year later, the full million would still be there. So… and I’ve been handling his money ever since. The rest is history. So we got married. Everyone thought I was going to be a Caucasian woman, I think because we met in Germany, I don’t know. Some of the people who came from the wedding were like, “We heard from a very credible source.” So when the doors of the church opened, and I came out, it was like, “Uh! (gasp)” He took my hand, and he was like, “And it doesn’t come off.” He did not marry a Caucasian woman, as you can see. For whatever reason, that was the rumor, that I was going to be Caucasian.
R: Did you marry in Germany, or no—?
W: No, I married actually in Indianapolis, which is where I lived prior to coming to Ohio. I lived there for about ten years, and that’s where I worked at IUPUI and Butler University; I had a job there. Actually, this is weird – how much I've been wearing the uniform. I worked with ROTC, at the university, so I was working at a college. First I was in the admissions office, and then ROTC—they found out about me, so I ended up working trying to find college students to give scholarships to, to join the military to then be commissioned to start out as a Second Lieutenant. So the very program that I went through as a college student, now I was working as a staff member. What a small world. People that knew me when I was a college student would never believe that I would work for the very program that I so detested when I was a college student. Because you had to get up early in the morning and do PT, and when I was in college, getting up at six o’ clock, six thirty, to go work out and run and scream and do PT and pushups and sit ups was not my friend. I was not a morning person back then, and I'm still not a morning person. That’s why it’s so ironic that I would be doing this. ‘Cause now I can get up like four or five o’ clock in the morning and think nothing of it. Any time, get three hours of sleep, five hours of sleep, just keep driving on.
R: Well that’s a perfect segue then. Let’s talk about your actual training that you had in the military.
W: Well, the training always, starting out in college, everything is gradual. They start you out slow. When I first joined, I couldn’t even do a pushup, I couldn’t run; I was not athletic. I think because I felt like there was so many people betting that I could not do it, it made me that much more determined to do it. First time was like, I just could not do a pushup—literally, could not do one. You go through the training and eventually get commissioned, and the things you do when you are in college, they try to instill confidence in you, and yes, you can do it and those types of things. And then, once you get to be a Second Lieutenant, for each step that you have, there is military training you have to do. It’s almost like a little checklist; if you want to get to this rank, here are the things you have to do. So you do those things, you get good assignments; I had a lot of diversity in my career in terms of assignments. I had good write ups, I completed the required schooling—military education and civilian education. Then you just continuously will get promoted. I think also a part of it is, you start out as a Second Lieutenant, and you think, “Oh, wow, if I could ever get to be a Captain one day.” Like, that seems like really big stuff. But then by the time you make it to Captain, you’re like, “I’m not impressed”; “If I could ever get to be Major.” And then you get to be Major, and you go, “Hm, so what? I’m not impressed. Let’s see if I could make Lieutenant Colonel.” So here I am, Lieutenant Colonel, and I’m still like, “I’m not impressed. So what?” But at some point, you have to stop. My husband’s been wanting to have children for the last five years, and I've not really been able to do it because I’ve been really more focusing on my military career, but I’m thinking, and you can probably look at me and tell, I’m kind of running out of time to be having babies. So it’s like, if I’m going to have children, I’m probably going to have to get out the military. Although a lot of people will do both, I’m at that crucial point now where I’ have to make a decision to do one or the other. The fact of the matter is, based on my track record, if I continue to stay in and do everything like I've done, I would get promoted to the next level, so I don’t have anything to prove to anyone. Everybody’s hung up on, “You need to have children, you need to have children.” I’m thinking about it, I’ll just say that.
R: Okay, you heard it here on the camera. What, if any, do you feel was your biggest challenge to overcome in the military?
W: Probably a couple things. The biggest challenge is just the physical stamina. The military is dominated by men, so as a woman, being able to hold your own physically, mentally—it all goes together. Really, what I've found is that if you aren’t in shape physically, it will then cause a level of stress that other people don’t have. Other people may be just worried about getting to that next meeting, writing an op order, or whatever it is they have to do. But if I have to worry about the work stuff and the physical stuff—just being able physically to hold my own. We have a PT test—physical training, physical fitness test, in which you have to do two miles running, two minutes worth of sit ups, and two minutes worth of pushups—pushups, sit ups, and a two mile run. If you have to worry about, “Oh, gosh—can I do the required number of pushups in two minutes, sit ups?” Just the physical part can be troublesome. It turns out that I’m okay, but just the stress to have to work out constantly to be able to maintain that. I always say, the military has been good for me, because if I weren’t in the military, there’s no telling what size I would be, looking at the women in my family. So it forces me—like yesterday, I went running three and a half miles. That’s unimaginable to me at one time that I would volunteer and go out and run three and a half miles. But the fact of the matter is, if I don’t work at it, I won’t be able to pass. I don’t have that stress now like I did when I was younger. An entire company of forty some people go running, and you're running in a group, and everyone’s calling cadences: “When my granny was ninety-one, she did PT,” well I didn’t want to call cadences; I’m using every breath of energy I have just to put one foot in front of the other, and once it’s over with, everyone’s like, “Oh, that was so much fun, and we had a great time,” and for me, I just had attitude; this is not fun to me! But it was because I was so out of shape. That was probably my biggest challenge because it’s a requirement constantly, every year, twice a year, so on and so forth. So finally, I just made the mindset that you can’t wait until the test to get ready. It has to become a part of your lifestyle so that it’s natural and not stressful. And that’s what I've had to do. So that was probably my biggest challenge.
R: You mentioned how it’s mostly men in the military. Can you talk about that a little bit—your experience with being a woman in the military?
W: Yeah. My last deployment that I just got back—I was the only woman, and I was the only person of color at my rank, and it was very stressful. So often, when you're in the military, you think, “Oh, we’re the same rank,” and there’s sort of that instant bonding. But I didn’t feel that this time, and it may be a number of reasons. It may be because I was thrown in with a unit of people I didn’t know, so this was not my own unit; I was what they call cross-leveled. A lot of the people lived in Arkansas, and here I was coming from Ohio, so they didn’t have a whole lot of familiarity with me. And even though we may all have the same rank, a lot of times men—because they're men—just think they're smarter than you or think that because of the job they have in the military—like their job is more important than your job. You know, I’m a human resources officer, so people consider that, I’m a paper pusher. “All you do is office work.” Like, what they do is more important because they're outside, or they’re infantry or whatever their job is, and I find it particularly interesting because there probably over two hundred jobs in the military, and as far as I'm concerned, no one job is more important than the other. Everyone needs to do their job in order for us to work together as a team. So guess what? You might not think much of me being a paper pusher, or you know, the word has changed—human resources is what it’s called now; it used to be called personnel. But guess what? When you have pay problems, or when you want to get promoted, or when you want to get that medal, or you need orders, oh now you want to come see me. Now I'm your friend. Well, we all have a job to do, and so that has been probably one of the biggest challenges: being in a career that’s dominated by men. And the military has also changed quite a bit. When I first came in, men were allowed to say rude and crude things, and it was acceptable. And now, we’re getting away from that. It’s really not acceptable. It’s not tolerated. I want males to see me as a soldier just like everyone else, and not as a female. I don’t want any cat calls, any whistling—treat me just like you do the other soldiers. Address me by rank and last name. I don’t want anyone flirting with me and those types of things. I've been in the military long enough, though, to kind of see that go full circle, if you will.
R: How long has it been, you think, since that started to turn around?
W: Since I’ve been in the military, it’s sort of a gradual thing, but I would say for sure in the last five to seven years, the culture of the military has been changing. They do require training to say, “No, that’s not acceptable.” They don’t allow men to put up the pictures of Playboy magazine, all the little girly pictures. If it’s offensive, then no, you can’t do it. When I was younger, like when I was a Second Lieutenant, I can remember a major constantly just sexually harassing me, and when I told him I was going to report it, he laughed. He thought it was a joke; he was like, “Psh, report it, and by the time they do anything about it, I’ll be retired.” So I never reported it. Nowadays, if someone was doing those kind of things that guy was doing to me, it would be a big deal. They would do an investigation, the whole nine yards. They would take it really, really serious. So yeah, I would say probably in the last five to seven years, the military is really serious. They do take things like that serious.
R: So it’s really been turned around.
W: Mhm.
R: One of the other things you mentioned was the fact that you're a person of color, so talk to me a little bit about that. That, and if that has affected your actual career in the military, but also if you’ve seen that change ___.
W: Yes, it certainly has affected my career. I can remember when I was a Lieutenant at the time. And I've been in the military now, I don’t know, probably through at least two downsizing of the military. I could remember a captain, white male, saying to me, “You're really lucky that you're still in the military. It’s because you’re black and you're female; you're a double minority. So you're still in.” Like, that wass the reason I didn’t get cut, because I was black and female. Now, what you have to know is that in order to be in the military—in order to be an officer, you have to have a college degree. That’s the minimum. This guy was a captain, and he didn’t have a college degree. Hmm. I had my master’s degree. You are at a higher ranking than I am with no degree at all, yet you are a captain. I looked at him, I said, “Let me tell you something, sir,” I said, “The reason that I am still in is because I am great at what I do. If you looked like me, you never would have made it to a captain without a college degree.” And I thought, “When you are white, you get breaks.” That’s what I learned. Because the same rules do not apply to them. Somehow, they were able to still get promoted, rise to the top without meeting the minimum standards, but that was not the case for people that look like me. I don’t know. I can’t really explain it. There’s certain requirements. How did this guy make it past Second Lieutenant, First Lieutenant, and then become a Captain. So now he was being asked to leave the military because he didn’t have his degree, and now he wants to say it’s because of race that I'm still in. I thought, “Guess what buddy? It might have been race that maybe allowed me to get my foot in the door, but you don’t stay in the game if you're not competent and good at what you do.” I was really offended, because of the whole thing about affirmative action, people think that somehow that means that if you are a person of color, you can be incompetent and still keep a job, and that’s really not what affirmative action was all about. Anyways, I would say as a person of color and female, I've always felt like I had to be better than; I could not just do the minimum in order to be competitive. But not anything I was offended by, because I grew up at a very young age knowing, hey if you want to compete with everyone else, you can’t do the minimum. You have to excel and go beyond the minimum in order to stay even.
R: Mhm. I know what you mean.
W: So being female, being a person of color, and one of the other things I noticed in my career—we have what we call evaluations. It’s nothing more than a report card of your performance for the past year or whatever. I noticed that, during my evaluations, that people would describe me in such a way that I could just read it and know that they were sending a message to the committee that I was black. It was like code, and I didn’t like that. For example, people would always describe me as being very articulate. And one would say, that’s not an insult. But for me, it was an insult because I have a Bachelor’s degree in journalism and speech communication, and I have a Master’s degree. I should be articulate. Don’t give me extra credit, bonus points for being articulate. The other thing is my white counterparts were never described as being articulate. So I always felt it was code for, “You speak pretty good for a black girl.” You know what I mean? And I'm like, don’t waste the paper on something so insignificant. Talk about something that’s really important. You know. Just those things, and finally, after I saw it on my evaluation three years in a row, the fourth person, I was like, “Do not say that I am articulate.” It is not a compliment—it just is not. It’s almost an insult because in my mind, I thought, “Well, you don’t expect me to be articulate?”
R: That should be the minimum, at least.
W: Exactly. Exactly. So don’t give me points for doing the minimum. The things that are there, they're so subtle that you almost can’t even say anything about them because the other person in is looking at you like, “Gee, what’s your problem?” So just over the years, I have kind of mellowed, and I just accept people for where they are and who they are. “Okay, sir. Sure. Whatever.” Wearing the patch, the combat patch, is really important to some people. I remember a guy who was the same rank as I was: “Oh, you don’t have the combat patch!” Okay, so what, does that mean my military experience is not as valuable as yours because you do have a combat patch? This guy had a PhD—I forget the correct terminology, but it’s nothing more than PE. He did some things that a doggone tenth grader would know better. It was so funny because here’s a guy who has a Bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD turning his nose up at me because I don’t have a combat patch, and he mispronounced a word on an award. A military award—a very common word that appears on probably ninety percent of military evaluations and awards, and he mispronounced it and didn’t know how it was pronounced. And when all the other Colonels looked at him, and we realized he didn’t know how to pronounce it, we were just like…. And I’m thinking to myself, “You want to look down your nose at me because I don’t have a combat patch, and you can’t pronounce a word that probably an eighth grader could pronounce? Give me a break.” So but anyways, yeah, it’s been an interesting ride, and I will say as the military has changed, though, people have then became a little bit more sensitive because there was one job I got, and I know specifically that that particular boss—he was looking for a person of color. He said he had an all-white staff, and he wanted to attract people of color to the program, and this was in Indianapolis, so there are plenty of people of color. When you have a program, and you’re in a city that has lots of minorities, you look at your program and say, “Gee, how did it get to be all white?” And so he made a conscious effort, and actually not just him, but the military period, just kind of had a movement where they were going to intentionally go after people of color to become army officers, so that’s how I ended up with that job.
R: And how did you feel about that; is that different from—?
W: It was a little bit different. The person that hired me, though, was a person of color; the rest of the staff was not. I think there was also some resentment because people felt like I didn’t go through the regular hiring process that other people go through. So it was sort of a double-edged sword, ‘cause he didn’t stay there forever. Once he left, the new guy that came in was a Caucasian Lieutenant Colonel—was just different. Different. Everything always has its challenges depending on people’s background ‘cause the next guy was a West Point graduate, so they're kind of their own animal in itself. Oh, I’m West Point. Okay, like West Point is better than being an ROTC graduate, so even within the military, people separate themselves—dissect themselves into their own little categories.
R: Do you feel that it made a difference, you knowing going in they were looking for a person of color?
W: For me, personally, it didn’t make that much of a difference. I remember a gentleman having a conversation with me, saying “Oh, you're lucky. You only got that job—“ Here it is, some fifteen years later, another guy says to me, “Oh you just got that job because you’re a woman and because you're black.” And that really hurt my feelings—gee, you really think that that’s all that I’m made of? I went to my boss, Colonel Smith, and I said, “Hey, this other guy—he made a good point. He felt like he should have gotten the job because he had more rank than I did, and he had more experience. How did I get this job?” My last name was Erby at the time. He said, “Erby, let me tell you something. Yes, he has more rank, and he has more experience in the military, but let me tell you what I’m looking for that he doesn’t have. You’ve been here at the university now for at least five years; you’ve worked in higher education; you know how the system works; you know who the players are; you know who the go-to people are. There have been things we’ve been trying to get done in this program for a very long time. You were able to come in and make those changes in no time flat and make it look easy and simple—stuff that we’ve been struggling with. You know the university; you're approachable; you don’t have a problem with going out and talking with students.” He said, “That guy there—when students look at him, they see their grandfather.” He was older, white hair, expects students to come to him—didn’t have the personality to necessarily go out and approach students. He said, “And I need people that certainly, like I said, are approachable, can go out and not sitting in their office waiting on someone to come and see them. Someone that can go out on campus and fit in with the college students.” And because I’m young-looking I guess—I've been told, even when I went to Iraq, people are like, “You don’t look old enough to be a Colonel.” Why say I don’t look old enough? The rest of those cats just look old as far as I'm concerned. But there’s this thing that I look young and I don’t look old enough. Anyway, I kind of lost my train of thought in all that. I just felt like there was going to be someone there that appreciated a different perspective, and the fact that I was different wasn’t going to make me an odd duck out. That difference would be celebrated and appreciated and valued.
R: Let me ask you now—let’s talk about your deployment. How many times have you been deployed?
W: Four times.
R: Can you tell us where and when?
W: 1990 at Fort Benning, Georgia. 1996 and ‘97 to Kaiserslautern, Germany. 2003-2004 to Heidelberg, Germany. And then most recently to Iraq.
R: What were your assignments?
W: All my assignments have all been tied into the fact that I'm a human resources officer personnel. I’m an AG officer, so they were all AG—
R: What’s AG?
W: Adjutant General. AG related—well not all of them. The first one was; I was in, like I said, that particular unit I was with, I worked in the personnel section, so we do a lot of processing people in and out and keeping track of people’s awards and what medals and ribbons they get and that type of thing. The second deployment that I had in 1996-’97, I deployed to Kaiserslautern, what they call K-town, and I worked in a deployment operation cell. So you're working essentially seven days a week, and you're briefing a One Star General, I think at the time. That was really interesting because you're working in a deployment operation cell. If you could imagine, this could be a deployment operation cell: no windows, high security, and you have these briefings that you have to give, and their people—they do a VTC, so video telecommunications type thing. So you may be in a room filled of people, and there may be people from all over—maybe Bosnia, Hungary, wherever—and everybody is tuned into the meeting. This could be really stressful when there is a General at a table in a room full of people, and you go in, and you have to brief. And this was the one time that I thought being black is beautiful. I can get nervous, and I don’t break out in hives, and my complexion don’t change, and all that good stuff. My counterparts—I'm telling you—they would get nervous, and their skin would—I would never forget; I was nervous for them. I think I was more nervous when they were briefing than I was when I was briefing. They would break out in hives, and they would start to perspire. And just seeing their complexion change and the texture and all that, I was like, “Whoo, that’s serious,” whereas, I could get nervous, but I was able to camouflage it a little bit more, so that was a good thing. And then 2003-2004, I deployed again. That time I was a battle captain, again, working in a very similar environment. We were tracking equipment and personnel that was going into Iraq. Some really very long, excruciating hours and that type of thing. The most memorable part of that deployment, I think—aside from meeting my husband; the guy that eventually became my husband—was Shashawna Johnson. She was the first African-American female POW. I remember looking up in the deployment operation cell, seeing her picture and just looking at her, and just the fact that she was a black female, saw myself, and just thinking, “Oh, wow. My gosh. That could have been me.” And just feeling heartbroken. Anyway, later on, I actually met her. She was a guest speaker at Butler University—one of the colleges where I worked. So that was really nice to actually see someone on TV and then eventually meet her later on in life.
R: What does POW mean?
W: Oh, I'm sorry. Prisoner of war.
R: So, what unit were you a member of? Was it the same thing when you were in the reserves?
W: Yes. What unit was I a member of this time?
R: Yes. So then you went to Iraq…
W: Went to Iraq, and I went with this unit here, “Tough ‘Ombres” 90th Sustainment Brigade in north Little Rock, Arkansas. That’s the unit that I was with. Essentially—I think I might have mentioned this earlier—I didn’t really have anything to do with the unit, but because they had holes and gaps in their—I'm trying to civilianize the terminology—
R: Thank you!
W: They had a roster of people required ranks and job specialties that they needed, so they needed someone with my skill set, and they didn’t have it within their unit, so they go to the big army in the sky and say, “Find me a human resources officer that’s a Major.” And boop, Tracy Williams pops up! Before it all happened though, eventually I got promoted. “Oh, I got promoted; I'm no longer an 04.” “That’s okay, we’ll take you anyway,” so off I went. That was the unit that I was with.
R: What was your job?
W: My job there is, I was the human resources—let’s see if I can remember—HROB. Human resources officer branch. I can’t believe I just deployed, and now I'm going brain dead on the acronyms. Essentially, my job was to open and close anything having to with postal, anything having to do with—we had liaison teams at the hospitals, and also to track personnel coming in and out of Iraq in a particular location. So I happened to be in a place called Balad, which was like a major hub for people transitioning in and out of Iraq. It was my job to keep track of those bodies. Human resources is really about accountability. Who’s in the hospital? Who’s on sick call? Where are they? If you have an emergency at home, and your loved one is in Iraq, you might not know where, but my job is to know where that individual is at all times. You could call the Red Cross and say, “My mother’s about to pass away, and I request that my husband come home,” and they can make that happen like that. Those are just some of the kind of things that people in human resources or personnel—what they do, their function, and why they're needed.
R: What was your first impression when you arrived in Iraq?
W: It was hot, hot.
R: And even with that heat, you still had to be in full uniform the whole time, right?
W: Yes. It was extremely hot. I started out in Texas though, and it was hot in Texas—like so hot you felt like you were sucking air through a straw.
R: What month?
W: It was August. It was over a hundred degrees for I forget how many days straight. I thought, “This is good training for, you know, where I’m going.” You can’t even imagine. It might have been a hundred and three, a hundred and five in Texas, but when I got to Kuwait, it was like a hundred and twenty-five, and the temperature just kept going up. If you can imagine being in a hundred and twenty-five, hundred and thirty, hundred and thirty-five degree weather—I don’t think you can imagine it. I didn’t even know the temperatures could get as high as they were. I call my mom. I say, “I've been dropped off in hell, and they're calling it Iraq and Kuwait.” It was hot. The other thing is, you know how we have snow storms? They have sand storms. If you can imagine what it looks like when all the snow is blowing, and we have a blizzard, but imagine that if sand—those little small speckles—oh gosh, it was just… The heat and the dirt and debris and sand just blowing, hitting you. It was just unimaginable. When I got to Kuwait, the other thing that I didn’t like is—you know, we take a lot of things for granted, basic things, like just being able to go to the bathroom. You go to the bathroom, flush the toilet; that’s pretty simple, right? It became a really major, big ordeal for me because in Kuwait, there was not a toilet; it’s just porta-pots, and you could smell them about a block before you would get to them. Imagine, the heat in a porta-pot—you’ve seen a porta-pot before, so you know how small it is. To have to go in there with your gear on. A lot of times, though, the stuff when you’re in full battle rattle, you don’t have all that on, but you have your weapon, and of course, our sleeves are always down, always. Even in the summer, it doesn’t matter. That’s part of the uniform—the boots, everything. So to have to go in one of those and close the door and go to the restroom, oh my gosh. The heat was unbelievable. The heat bothered me so much—they have three meals a day; they had breakfast, lunch, dinner, and then they had four meals. They had a midnight chow. The heat bothered me so much, and other soldiers, that we stopped eating during the day when the sun was up, and we would stay inside because the tents are air conditioned, thank you Lord Jesus. But I would eat midnight chow because it was too hot during the day, and I just did not want to go out. It was just that hot.
R: Were you able to keep hydrated enough?
W: Oh, yes. Now the military, I will tell you, they are really, really good on “Drink water. Drink water. Drink water.” They provide water… look like every few steps. You can find water; it’s not cold often times, but it is water. And they give you these things like camel packs to put on your back, and it’s filled with water. So you're constantly drinking water, but I didn’t want to drink water because I didn’t want to go to the bathroom. I didn’t want to go to that porta-pot that stinks! So yes I drank water—enough just to that I wouldn’t pass out because you also have a lot of heat casualties in that environment, as you could imagine. My first impression of Iraq when I landed is it was hot, dusty, dirty, sandy. Everything’s the same color. You didn’t see any grass. Everything just looks miserable compared to the United States, where we have flowers and grass, and in fact, I saw a patch of grass there, and every time people went past, it was like, “Look! There’s grass!” I mean, just to see grass there is exciting to us because everything is dirt, rocks, gravel. Nothing’s paved. These are the things we take for granted, but the bathroom continued to be an issue. A lot of the bathrooms in Kuwait, you could not flush tissue down the toilet. Our mindset is, my goodness, that’s what a toilet is for. You should be able to flush the tissue down there. Without giving you a long story about it, you couldn’t; I’ll just tell you that. Then when I went to Iraq, you had bathrooms that you could not have a bowel movement in. That’s another special kind of bathroom you have to go to. The simple things become stressful because you may not always know when you have to go that first bathroom that you might have to have a bowel movement.
R: How long were you there?
W: Let me see, my tour was cut kind of short. I ended up leaving there in April. So from August of 2009 to April of 2010, almost May. So not quite, a little less than a year. But, I will tell you don’t feel too sorry for me. I have to say this because if anybody sees this, they’ll go “Ugh!” Because of my rank, where I lived—I lived in a chu, which stands for containerized housing unit. Just imagine the back of a U-Haul truck; someone puts up some panel walls, cuts out a little window, and that’s your space. But because of my rank, I had a bathroom—I had what they call a wet chu. You have a toilet and a sink and a shower in it. So I did not have to walk a block or two blocks like a lot of the other people did. But I don’t apologize for it because I feel like I've paid my dues, so I deserved that wet chu. I was happy about that wet chu.
R: I’m glad that you mentioned the living corners because I was going to ask you, how was that or has that been in all the times that you deployed being a woman? Did you have to room, then, with other women? This time, you had your own space, or did you room with someone in that space?
W: I’m glad you asked that because this is something that the military sucks at. The military is big on fraternization, can’t fraternize, which means it’s not just men and women fraternizing, but same sex. So if I’m an officer, and you're enlisted, we don’t become buddy, buddy and pals and so personal. A lot of times, they keep you separate in terms of living corners. They do that for the men, but often times, they do not do that for the women. They're so big on fraternizing, but they put people in the situation where they're living together, they're showering together, and they're using the bathroom, and they're doing everything together; they can’t help but probably ultimately fraternize if you're not careful, so that’s a double standard that the military has. They say they do it because we’re women, and we’re so few in numbers, so while they have one standard for men; it kind of falls apart, then, when it comes to women. In past deployments, one deployment, I lived in a two bedroom apartment with four women. So there were only two bedrooms—we have two women in each room. We were officers; we were majors. Again, it’s a double standard because I was in the reserves, but the active duty people didn’t have that. If you were a major, you had your own living space, but again, I think because we were reservist, and we were called up, and it was just a short length of time—a little over a year or better—no one really cares. This last deployment that I had—it’s always all so dictated on location and what’s available. I did have my own space—no roommate, there was someone living on the other side of the wall, and we share bathroom. My husband, who’s the same rank as I am, he’s in Afghanistan, but he’s got like three roommates, but the situation in Afghanistan is very different than the situation in Iraq. It really just depends. There’s times where I have roommates, and there’s times that I have not. When I was in Kuwait, I was only there for about ten days—thank you Lord Jesus, once again—but I was in a tent that housed sixty women. You want to talk about I couldn’t wait to get out of that environment? Living with sixty women, and we were sleeping on cots, and there’s probably only about that much space between each cot. One person got sick, the person in the next cot got sick, and it just had a ripple effect. That whole thing about germs and washing your hands—I could “ah-choo” sneeze, and tomorrow you would be sick. And then you sneeze, and then Carla would be sick. I just never had seen anything like it. You're just in such close quarters. Then everyone has their own different personality. Women aren’t what they used to be. These women have foul mouths, potty mouths, would curse—using profanity. There used to be a time that people wouldn’t curse around people who are senior to them; men wouldn’t curse around women; you wouldn’t curse in mixed company; and you certainly wouldn’t curse around anyone that was old enough to be your parent. That is all completely out the window now. Just being in that environment—I had to say to someone, “Excuse me, I really don’t want to hear all that profanity; could you please not curse?” And one female was like, “Pff. This is the army. I’ll work on it, but I'm going to curse again.” Had I not been in uniform, I think I really would have given her a piece of my mind, but I was like, you know what—I only got to be here ten days, just relax. Tempers are flaring particularly when it’s hot anyway, and then people are in a stressful situation. I just decided to let it go—let it ride. Pick and choose your battles.
R: How did you keep in touch with your family while you were away?
W: I wrote, I called, and I emailed. Kind of a combination of things. My immediate family—my parents—writing and telephone, ‘cause they’re not big on email. My husband—initially, he was not deployed; he was back here in Ohio, so it was email, letters, and phone, so everyone, just a combination of those three things.
R: We’ve been talking about you as an officer and a woman and a woman of color, but now, how about what is it like to be the wife of a person in the service?
W: That’s funny you say that because I got married a little bit later in life. I was thirty-eight when I got married, so of course, when I married my husband, we were both officers. We were both the same rank. Remember when I told you about this thing about men thinking what they do is more important?
R: Mhm.
W: It doesn’t change just because they're your husband. While my husband appreciates me, some how and some way, I think that in his own little mind, what he does is just a little bit more important than what I do. We were both majors—I wouldn’t have had it any other way—same rank, but then he got promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. I was still a major, and I was like, “Oh, no! I'm not getting out until I get promoted to Lieutenant Colonel.” So now I'm a Lieutenant Colonel, and I could tell you, just a little bit of me really wants to stay in until I make it to Full Bird Colonel and let him get out so I outrank him when we retire. It works out well because he really has an appreciation for what I do. And vice versa, and because we’re both in, we understand the sacrifice and the importance of that. To give you an example, there are times when things going on with his family—his mother—and they want to, “Well we need to call Eugene, and tell him da-da da-da…” I shield him from that because I know how important what he’s doing in Afghanistan and how important it is that he stays focused—focused and not be distracted by the things that are going on back in the states that you can’t control anyways. A lot of times, when you're a civilian, and you don’t know the military aspect of it, you're so quick to tell your loved one, give them that bad news about XYZ or whatever. So I think with me being in the military, I’m able to be a little bit more sensitive, and also, it helps if anything does go wrong, a lot of times, they don’t have a clue like, “If we want to get in touch with him in Afghanistan, how would we do that?” And because I know the process, I'm able to be effective and to be of help to them, if that makes any sense. So just being dual military, it has its plusses and minuses. I was at one unit, and we both worked for a one star general on staff, and it was interesting that my husband was like, “Oh he’s the G4,” and I was the G1, but no one ever described me as being the G1. The G1 is human resources, so I'm the primary, lead, go-to-guy for that general. And my husband, same thing, if you’re on staff. Well, no one said, “This is Major Williams, the G1.” They would say, “This is Major Williams’ wife.” So I thought that was interesting. ‘Cause I’m like, when he gets introduced, oh he’s the G4, but I'm Colonel Williams’ wife. I’m not his, Colonel Williams’ wife! I’m the G1! You know? No one said, he, Colonel Williams is the husband to the G1. He gets a title related to his job, but I get tagged as being his wife. It irritated me so much I eventually left and took another job somewhere else because I want my own identity tied in with why I'm even there to begin with, which is, I'm wearing this green suit for a reason. I'm not his wife. It was pretty funny because the chief of staff—I would never refer to my husband as my husband—I would always refer to him as Major Williams, Colonel Williams, whatever his rank was, and so for a while, people didn’t know we were married because I was so formal. And there were lots of other Williams. Williams is a very common name; we had like four Williams—two black, two white, a female, a male. So no one ever could make the connection. And when they realized he was my husband, they were like, “Do you always call him Colonel Williams? Do you call him Colonel Williams when you are at home?” And I’m like, “No! But when we’re here and in this uniform and at this unit and duty, he is not my husband. He is Colonel Williams. And that’s how I address him, and I’d like you to do the same.” You know what I mean?
R: Did he do the same when he referred to you?
W: Absolutely. Major Williams, Colonel Williams. Whatever. When we are at work, like I said, he is not my husband, and I am not his wife. So if I have to call him, “Is Colonel Williams there?” And when I leave a message, “Please let him know that Colonel Williams called.” It’s just, to me, about professionalism. Not my husband, and I'm his wife. I just don’t see it that way. So anyway, people thought that was kind of strange, and maybe it was, but that’s just me and my personality, and it works best for me to do it that way.
R: Let’s talk about the time that you spent overseas. Just the actual—where you talked about the climate, and you talked about the environment. Now let’s talk about the actual culture—the people, the food, the local culture. What was your reaction to that and vice versa? Was there a resentment of any kind to having the military there? Did you experience that?
W: No, not at all. Being in Europe period, and being overseas, is almost, in a lot of ways, a breath of fresh air compared to being in the United States. People aren’t nearly as color conscious as we are in the states. They don’t care that you're black. They don’t care that you're a person of color. They do not care, literally. They don’t just give lip service to it, you know? Here in the United States, I am always very aware of the fact that I am a black woman. You go, you apply, check the block. You're always aware of it, but once you go overseas, the Germans, they just don’t care. They are probably more focused on the fact that you're an American, but they don’t see us as being black-American, white-American, so that was really nice. As I got to know some of the Germans, they were very difficult people to get to know, but once you get to know them, they're like a friend for life. I’ll never forget meeting a German young lady; she was in her twenties—very bright to me because she spoke like four different languages. I thought, “I’m really glad that you speak English because I know no German!” I've been to Germany like fourteen times, and I could probably say three words in German: good morning, excuse me, and goodbye, oh, and thank you. That’s it. Americans are—we’re language lazy, I say, because we very seldom want to learn another language, and we expect everyone else to speak our language. That’s neither here nor there, but when I go over there, I'm only there for a year at a time or very short periods of time, and German would have been just too difficult for me to learn. But the food was good. Germany is a very clean country—very, very clean. Very quiet kind of place. I was friends with a gentleman, and I remember him saying, “Why are Americans so loud?” You can go into an establishment, and you always know the table where Americans are sitting because we talk louder than everyone else. The Germans—let’s say this place is a restaurant filled with Germans—I swear they speak at a doggone whisper. You cannot hear individual conversations, whereas Americans, you can hear the person the table or two tables over, and hear their full conversation. That was kind of different. The other thing I remember is getting on the bus and taking transportation. Getting on the bus and someone saying, “You need to walk to the back of the bus,” and I’m like, “Those days are over; I'm not walking to the back of the bus!” But this is because as Americans and being so race-conscious, that’s how it is for us, but there, everyone gets on the bus and walks to the back of the bus because they save the first ten seats or so for the elderly passengers that are going to be getting on later in the route. It’s not printed somewhere; it’s just sort of an unspoken courtesy that all the people do there. And I thought, “Wow, they really respect their elders.” So just the fact that I even thought—I don’t know; my mind went back to the Civil Rights, ‘60s, Rosa Parks, “I'm sitting down in the first available seat on the bus.” But it wasn’t that at all. It was an interesting experience. I will say that is one of those places I probably never would have gone to if the military had not sent me, but I was glad I did. Beautiful countryside, even some of the activities were different that I enjoyed; they had these Volksmarches where you go walking 5k throughout the—it’s like 3.2 miles, and you just walk. It’s a form of exercise. Their refrigerators are smaller than ours; they tend to go to the market a lot more often. Food is more fresh. Just a very different—blowing your horn is illegal unless you really are blowing it for someone to get out the way, but no one will pull up in the driveway and go “err, err!” for you to come out. It’s just a very quiet, just a different kind of place than the U.S.. And they're not the workaholics that we are here either. The downtown, when I initially started visiting Germany, would be closed on a Saturday. Oh my gosh! You mean the mall and the shops are closed on a Saturday? Go figure! Okay, fine. We’ll open one Saturday a month for you Americans—that type of deal because we like to shop.
R: Okay, starting to wrap up, in your entire time that you have been in the service, what was the one thing that you would say shocked you? I guess more when you were overseas.
W: One thing that shocked me was—I've been in the military, and I've had a pretty good career: had never been written up or anything like that, never in any trouble, never reprimanded for anything—but this particular year, I got in some trouble, and I couldn’t believe it. It started over something so minor. I was talking to a young lady in the barracks—this goes back to the fraternization thing because I was an officer, but the person I was talking to was not. The woman I'm talking to is a white soldier; another female comes up, and we’re engaged in a conversation, and she says something about, “Oh, I know this colored gal da-da da-da…” I’m like, colored? This is like 2004 maybe—2005, somewhere in there. I’m thinking, “You mean to tell me that somewhere in the United States, people are still referring to black people as being colored?” So I asked her, I’m like, “Where are you from?” She’s like, “Alabama.” I said, “They still call us colored in Alabama?” I said, “Put your hand out,” and she was like, “No.” “Put your hand out,” and she was like, “No.” So I tapped her on the leg; I said , “We are not colored anymore.” I said, “We’re either black or people of color. Maybe you didn’t get that email, but no one’s using that terminology anymore. Not in this century anyway.” That was it for me. It spiraled out of control the next day. The police came to arrest me. She had filed charges against me for assault. Assault by the military definition is any time you hit or touch someone without their permission, and when I tapped her on the leg like that, that was assault. So the police came, they read me my rights, and I was just like—I couldn’t believe it. I'm giving you the real short version of the story. But I ended up having to call someone to release me so that I would not have to actually be locked up. And it has been on the blotter report, which meant the news got back to the United States in like no time. The general there at the unit where I was, was then notified. Any time you're in the blotter report, that’s like newsflash, newsflash, newsflash! I got written up, and I was like, wow. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, well let me swallow my pill, because she did tell me no, and I did tap her—touch her, whatever—anyways. I did, I only ask them one thing, I said “I'm going to sign my counseling statement, but I just would like to know, did you talk with the other person that was there?” because right now everything is all based upon the female that I tapped. I said, “Did you interview the female that I was talking to?” They said, “Oh, there was another person there?” I'm like, “Yes.” And so they said no. So I said, “I'm going to sign this, but please at least talk to her and get her side of it.” They said they would; now, I’m like, oh my gosh! Because the two of them were roommates. What if the two of them get together? They're both white females; they're roommates. And they give the same version of the story, and then I'm the odd man out. But this is the one time it paid off because they came back to me and said my version matched the other girl’s version verbatim. So it turned out that it did not kill my career, but it very well could have, and I would not be a lieutenant colonel now. So that was probably—I forget, what was your question you asked me?
R: Shock.
W: Yes, shock. That was what shocked me. It was a shocker for me because it was a really big deal. When I went to try to talk to the female, she had a group of men in front of her, and they would not even let me talk to her. I was trying to find out like what was the problem, apologize, something—try and make amends.
R: As if you had abused her.
W: Yes. It spiraled way, way, way out of control, and I could just see the headlines, you know: Black Female Punches White Soldier. I just tried to let it die, let it go, but I learned a lesson. I learned, in the military, just do not touch people. Just don’t. How people receive it could be totally different. So yeah, that was shock for me. I was like, “Assault?” And the fact that my name had the word assault next to it, and I was written up. All my years in the military, I had a pretty stellar record, but anyway, that was it.
R: As we’re wrapping up… you mentioned that, and we know that you moved here from your vacation, and you live in Ohio currently?
W: I live in Ohio most of the time; I'm not living in Ohio now, but I normally do. I'm in Texas now, living in Texas.
R: Why did you feel it was important to be part of this project?
W: First of all, I heard about it through my church, and my church plays a very big role in my life, so any time they make a recommendation, or they send me an email—even though I get hundreds and hundreds of emails—if it’s coming from my church, I will give it a little bit more attention. So I did, and once I saw your email saying what you were looking for, I called to get some additional information. I thought, “Wow, that’s really good,” because so often when you're the underdog, no one ever asks you what you think. So I thought, “This will be a good time.” Even where I work, people are like, “You're going to spend five hundred some dollars to go back blah blah..” I’m like, “Yes?” And they were like, “Well, why aren’t they paying for your ticket? And blah blah blah…” I just said, “You know what? This is something that’s important to me. Because I believe in the project that they're doing, I'm willing to put my money behind it and do it. That’s pretty much it. It was something I had not been a part of, and I thought, this is a chance—a lot of times people complain about, this isn’t right; that’s not right. If you really want to stand behind something, put your time, energy, resources—and if that means a little money, oh well. I figure, you make it for a reason. It wasn’t convenient getting here from Malta, and then I have a trip out tomorrow, but this was really important; I think you all are doing really, really important stuff, and I appreciate the fact that you all asked and allowed me to be a part of this moment.
R: Thank you. Thank you so much. As we conclude, is there anything that you want to state or leave us with that I haven’t mentioned or asked about—kind of a final statement from you?
W: I guess the last thing—two things come to mind as I think about the whole project that you are working on. One is that we all need to get outside our own little comfort zone; there’s some people that have never been out the 270 loop, you know? So if you ever just dare to travel outside that little loop, you begin to realize that not everyone thinks and does things the way we do. We as Americans, we’re kind of spoiled because we think everyone does things the way we do, and once you start to travel a little bit, you realize not everyone does everything the way we do, and guess what? They are happy about not doing everything the way that we do. It’s okay. It’s okay to be different. That’s one theme: that we should celebrate our diversity and whatever form it comes in. And then the other thing is that my military career would never be what it is today and I’d be sitting here twenty-three years later if I didn’t have all these other people encouraging me. Coworkers, neighbors, parents, and so that whole concept that it takes a village to raise a child; there were so many times I didn’t think I could do it, I didn’t want to do it, I wanted to give up, I wanted to get out. But because so many other people believed in me, and was like “Oh, you just hang in there, girl! You just keep going! You can do it!” Like, “I don’t think I can!” But just knowing that other people believed in me, and it didn’t matter what race they were, what age, but most people—I’d say ninety-nine percent of the people that I’ve come into contact with, they’ve been able to encourage me, and some small, some big. All of those things kept pushing me along even though it was something I didn’t really want to do and had no intentions in staying. So I think that’s the beauty of it all that we really never know what impact one person can make on your life. I tell each person, “Do what you can do. Do it to the best of your ability because you never know how much you may be encouraging the next person.” That’s it.
R: Thank you. I said that was the last thing, but now I have to ask you something. I realized that I wanted to—we talked so much about the issues that have come up in your career in the military being black and being a woman and age and all of that, but also, you probably might have had some good mentors that helped you along the way. Did you want to say anything about that?
W: The mentoring, believe it or not, I’d like to see more. I try to do more mentoring now that I'm at the rank that I’m at because I find that the higher you go up, you are able to mentor people. Most of my mentoring did not come from my military people. A lot of my mentoring came from, because I was dual career—military and civilian—most of my mentoring came from civilians that knew nothing about the military. That’s why I was saying, you know, that people don’t realize how much they can encourage you. Because while they may not have known anything about the military, but the challenges that existed in other areas of people’s life, and I was able to take those experiences and apply them, like I said, just transfer them over to the military. Sometimes the military can be a dog eat dog world because each person is trying to outdo, outperform, get that top block, look good in front of the general, in front of the commander, or whomever. That they're not trying to help you. It’s like, trying to move you out the way so that they could get that top block type of thing. I never got caught up in that, maybe because the military was not my only life. You know, I had another life away from it, so my thing was, okay, I’ll do the best I can do, and wherever I fall—because in the military, they're always rank-ordering people, and that gets to be real competitive if you're that type of person. But no, I was just like, I’m just going to do what I can do, and if I get the top block, great, and if I don’t, well that’s fine too. Everyone can’t be that number one slot or that number two slot. Someone’s got to be average; someone’s got to fall in the middle, and if that happens to be where I fall, so be it. But I'm here to tell anyone, you can be average and still continue to get promoted. Just do your job, do it well, and the promotions will take care of themselves.
R: Thank you so much!
W: No problem.

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Rosa Rojas: Today is August 25, 2010. My name is Rosa Rojas, and I will be interviewing, can you please state your full name and spell it, for the record.
Tracy Williams: Tracy, no middle initial, Williams. T-R-A-C-Y, Williams, W-I-L-L-I-A-M-S.
R: Of the U.S. Army, and do you want to expand on what you mentioned before?
W: Oh, I was just saying that I’m in the army, but for people that like to distinguish between active duty, reserves, National Guard, those other categories within the army—so I was just being a little more specific—that I’m in the army reserves. In short, active duty, those are people that work full time; that’s all they do. Army reserves, these are people that have a fulltime civilian job, and they are in the military—they are in the army part time. These are the people that, when we go to war, and active duty can’t complete the mission, they call up the reserves. So that’s like reinforcement force, if you will. When they need extra people.
R: Have you ever been in active duty, or have you been reserve the entire time?
W: I have always been army reserves. I graduated college in 1989 and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1990, and I started my career. So all of my deployments, everything I've done, has been in the reserves. Then I had an additional job in addition to being in the military.
R: We’ll get back to that. I need to say that this interview is being conducted at the Ohio Historical Center in Columbus, Ohio, and it is part of an oral history project by the Ohio Historical Society to preserve the stories and experiences of people in the service and their family members for future generations. Tell us about your background—where were you born and when where did you grow up?
W: I am originally from Chicago; I grew up in Chicago and Gary, Indiana. I went to college at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, where I was a double major in journalism [and] speech communication. I graduated from there and started life. I was commissioned as a second lieutenant, like I said. I was commissioned in 1989, but because I finished in December, my degree is not stamped until the following year. So commissioned in ’89, graduated in 1990 is what my degree says, but actually finished in ’89. And then, pretty much started my career from there. My first deployment occurred in 1990, Desert Storm. And that’s kind of the start of it. I’m the oldest of two. Journalism, I had plans that I would be the next Oprah Winfrey. That didn’t happen, so here I am now as Tracy Williams. I actually got a chance to go to Oprah’s show; I was going to ask if I could replace her when she goes off the air, but I had attitude that day, so I didn’t get a chance to talk to her.
R: You were in the audience?
W: Yes, I was in the audience. So yeah, I deployed in 1990, participated, but if you recall, that war was short, so I was only deployed for a little over three months. After that experience, I was like “Man, if I could do this; if I could go to war, I could do anything.” But I ended up, once we got called up, I ended up being called up stateside at Fort Benning, and so then I decided to pursue my Master’s degree after that. So my background on the civilian side is in higher education. Once I did that, then I went back to school, started working on my Master’s degree, and I could go on and on and on, but that’s the start.
R: Two questions—what does stateside mean, please? State that for our audience.
W: It means that even though I was called up during Desert Storm, I did not go overseas. The unit that I was with, I ended up going to Fort Benning, Georgia, and the troops and the soldiers that we were training—our mission was to train soldiers so had there been a high casualty rate, the soldiers that we were training would have been the next group of people into Iraq; they would then deployed overseas. It’s all about what type of unit you're with, and I happened to be with a drill sergeant unit at that time. I was like, “Who knows Muncie, Indiana is even on the map?” I mean, my goodness, I never thought that I’d get called up. My mom was like, “Tell them you're gay. Tell them you're gay!” She just did not want me to have to deploy. I was like, “Mom, I can’t tell them I’m gay.” ‘Cause at that time, okay, I’m really telling my age now. At that time, if you were gay, you were not permitted or allowed to serve in the military. And it was actually a question that they would ask you on the survey and on the questionnaire. It was something that people took very serious. The recruiter was asking me the questions, and one of the questions was, was I gay or homosexual—I forget how he worded it. I was like, “Yeah, right. Mhm. Yeah, I’m gay.” No smile, no anything. He’s like, “Seriously.” I’m like, “No, I’m not.” So my mom knew that if I told them that I was gay that that would be a way for me to not have to deploy. I was like, I can’t tell them I’m gay, not even to get out of going overseas. I just wouldn’t do it ‘cause then I thought, I couldn’t lie, and I thought, later on, how am I then going to undo it and say, “I’m really not gay; I just said that so I wouldn’t have to deploy.” Sorry, mom.
R: Okay, and then your master’s was in…
W: My Master’s was from Ball State University, and it’s in—this is a mouthful: Student Personnel and Administration Higher Education. It’s basically a degree to work in higher education and support services—admissions, financial aid, career services, so on and so forth. So not the teaching side of working at colleges and universities, but the administrative support side. My background happens to have been in admissions, but it was a degree that I could have worked in any support area at colleges and universities.
R: So how did you end up in the military?
W: Well, I’m a first generation college student, so no one in my family had ever gone to college; I was going to be the first. But we didn’t have any money; we didn’t have a plan. When I got to college, my meal ticket was being withdrawn because the bill hadn’t been paid, and it was just a struggle financially. My parents, though both of them were working, they were not good managers of money and had not saved any money. I had to come up with a plan. Like, okay, I want to do this; what’s the plan? Well my parents had not filed taxes, so I couldn’t even get financial aid and all that good stuff, so my plan was, “I know what I can do. I’ll become a resident assistant.” That’s working at the college in the dormitories. That will give me my room and board, and I’ll join the military, and that will give me—I could be in the reserves, and I get E5 pay, so that gives me the chance to skip levels one through four and get E5 pay. And I was in ROTC, and at the time, they give you a hundred dollars a month, and that was a whole lot of money back then. It seemed like it anyway. So I was like, “Okay. I’ll just do this so that I can get the money for college.” So it was never my intention to stay beyond my initial commitment. That was the start of it. The other thing is my mom had been in the army reserves. In fact, I should have brought you a picture of my mom when she was in the military. I’m going to one day have it framed with when she was in and then a picture of me and try to put them side by side. My mom was like, “You should join the reserves and talk to a recruiter.” I really didn’t want to do it, but I did it just to get my mom to stop nagging me about it, and it stuck. Here I am now, twenty-three years later, still doing it. I did it to help finance my way through college because I wanted to graduate from college and be debt free. I didn’t want all this debt. That was the plan, to combine those two things.
R: Did it work?
W: It worked. I graduated debt free. I was a double major, like I said. I graduated in four years and one semester. It was a good plan in writing, and I stuck to the plan. The other reason why I joined was because I thought, “You know? Where else could you go—?” I would be like twenty-three years old when I graduated and already in a supervisor position. I thought, “Where else could I go at that age and be in a supervisor position?” Often times, the people I was supervising were older than I was, more knowledgeable than I, so I thought that would be pretty cool. I was like, “That’d be something I could put on my resume.” You're always thinking about, “Okay, what could I do that will give myself an extra step over the next guy or girl?” when you're graduating. And I thought, “Well, I'm not exceptionally good looking, I’m not exceptionally bright, and I’m not exceptionally rich,” so I needed another, and that was it.
R: Did that serve you well?
W: It did. It served me well. I don’t know where else I could go and make the kind of money that I make and the benefits I have and it be legal. So it turned out to be a good combination, because what I really found is that the skills that I've been able to acquire in the military are good transferrable skills no matter what you want to do in life. So being in the military has kind of enhanced whatever it is I wanted to do, personally or professionally. It turned out to be a good plan. A huge sacrifice, one which a lot of people don’t want to make, but it was worth it.
R: Okay, we’ll get into the sacrifice part later on in the interview, but I want to stick with asking you about then your career because you said the Reserve is for people that also have a fulltime job back at home, so what is that?
W: My fulltime career—well, like I said, my background is working at colleges and universities; I started out at Ball State University when I was working on my master’s. Actually, I really started when I was an undergrad, because like I said, I worked as a resident assistant, so I was like, “Okay, I kind of like this and some of the benefits.” Because back then, you could do resident life, and you could have your own apartment in the university. If you could imagine how much money you would save if you didn’t have to pay rent—utilities, phone, cable, those types of things. But I didn’t go that route; I ended up in admissions and so I think after I graduated from Ball State, my first job shortly after was working on my Master’s was at Earlham College, so I worked at Earlham College. I've been at IUPUI (Indiana University / Purdue University – Indianapolis), Butler University, different types of schools: small privates, selective liberal arts colleges.
R: In admissions?
W: Mhm.. So just some variety there. Once I got married—I met my husband in the military, so that was another good reason–I'm glad I joined the military; I might still be single otherwise. But I met my husband in Germany during a deployment, and then I moved to Ohio, and since then, I’ve been so incredibly busy with military and just a lot of other personal things that I have not gone back to work full time in terms of colleges and universities. I just have some other things that I'm working on. Financial type stuff—a lot of other things have been very rewarding and pretty fulfilling. Like I said, the military right now has just been consuming so much of my time because sometimes I'm away from home like six months at a time, so it would be very difficult to keep a civilian job being away for six months here, a year there—that kind of thing. I put the pause button on my civilian career until I can either retire or slow down what I'm doing in the military.
R: How far off is it for your retirement?
W: Oh, I can retire now. You only have to have twenty years, and I got my twenty year letter. I'm at twenty-three years now, and I'm seriously contemplating retirement. I'm thinking I might stop at twenty-five years. I don’t know; we’ll see. My husband is in Afghanistan right now, so we’ll talk about it once he gets back because the deployments, they take a lot out of you. We’ll see.
R: Can we talk a little about how you met your husband, you met him in Germany?
W: Yes, I met him in Germany during a deployment in 2003. We met, and of course, when I'm in my uniform and my work mode, I'm not thinking personal, so he was just Major Williams. So what? He’s 6’6”, three hundred pounds, dark chocolate—I mean, I call him my mister Mandingo man; he looks like he just got off a boat from Africa. We met, and he asked me, “Hey, what are you looking for in a husband?” And I said, “Well,” I really hadn’t thought about it, but I can wing things pretty good, so I just came up with like seven things. And oddly enough, about three weeks later, he came back to me and showed me proof about how he met all seven of those requirements. I was like, hoo, I got to sit up and pay attention. You know, because I'm thinking…
R: Wow. How long had you known him at that point?
W: A minute, maybe. Probably less than three months or something around there, and when he showed me the proof—like I had on there, finances. He showed me his W2, showed me the little thing you get from the social security office on how much you’re going to make when you are sixty-five, seventy. He was like, “I’m going to show you something, not to impress you, but to show you that I'm bringing something to the table other than paper plates and napkins.” I was like, alrighty then. I looked at it, and I was like, “Oh, okay.”
R: You’re credentials are in order, there.
W: Right, I thought, “Did I tell you I don’t want to work?” Anyways, education: he’s like, “I have a Bachelor’s degree in this, I have a Master’s degree in this.” Christianity. Actually, that was first on my list. He’s like, “I’m a member of St. Mark AME Church and I serve,” told me what positions he held at the church. He just went down the whole list. Family: “I’m the oldest of eight, and here’s what I do for my family, and blah blah blah.” I’m like, “Man this guy’s serious,” so once he finished, I thought, I really wasn’t looking at him like dating him, but I thought, “Well, now you’re forcing me to have to pay attention to you because you meet all seven of my requirements.” You know? But I was single, and I loved being single. I could have stayed single forever. I was like “Doggone it, now I really got to pay attention.” It was really funny. So he was actually leaving, going off to Kosovo, which was much more dangerous. Where I was, was not dangerous at all because I was in Germany. But where he was going was a lot more austere. I said, “Hey. Whatever you do, don’t give your roommates your ATM card,” because I knew his roommates, and I knew—I wouldn’t want to tell them what I knew about them on camera, but anyway, I knew they were not to be trusted. So he gives me his ATM card, and then gives me the pin number. And I'm thinking, “I've only known this guy, at that point, maybe thirty some days,” and I thought, “No way. No way. Nobody is that retarded enough to give you their pin number and the number to it.” So I’m bee bopping around Germany one day, and I don’t have anything to do, so I put it in the ATM machine, and I put in the pin number; I’ll never forget. The pin was Godd, G-O-D-D. And it took; well you know, since I was there, I had to see how much money was in there. Doot doot doot doot. Once I saw how much money, you know how in the cartoons where your eyes go “dow, shirrrr,” I was like, “Oh, I better go put this in a safe place.” So I did, and the next time I saw him, which like I said was probably about three months later, I like hit him upside the head, “Don’t you ever give anyone access to all your money. Are you crazy? You don’t know me like that.” And he looked at me, he said, “Discernment.” I’m like, “Discernment?” Discernment is a word that usually you will read in the bible. So as soon as he said it, it was a word I associated with the bible. He said, “Discernment. God had already revealed to me that you're not that kind of woman.” And he’s right, because I don’t know you, but if you gave me a million dollars, and you came back a year later, the full million would still be there. So… and I’ve been handling his money ever since. The rest is history. So we got married. Everyone thought I was going to be a Caucasian woman, I think because we met in Germany, I don’t know. Some of the people who came from the wedding were like, “We heard from a very credible source.” So when the doors of the church opened, and I came out, it was like, “Uh! (gasp)” He took my hand, and he was like, “And it doesn’t come off.” He did not marry a Caucasian woman, as you can see. For whatever reason, that was the rumor, that I was going to be Caucasian.
R: Did you marry in Germany, or no—?
W: No, I married actually in Indianapolis, which is where I lived prior to coming to Ohio. I lived there for about ten years, and that’s where I worked at IUPUI and Butler University; I had a job there. Actually, this is weird – how much I've been wearing the uniform. I worked with ROTC, at the university, so I was working at a college. First I was in the admissions office, and then ROTC—they found out about me, so I ended up working trying to find college students to give scholarships to, to join the military to then be commissioned to start out as a Second Lieutenant. So the very program that I went through as a college student, now I was working as a staff member. What a small world. People that knew me when I was a college student would never believe that I would work for the very program that I so detested when I was a college student. Because you had to get up early in the morning and do PT, and when I was in college, getting up at six o’ clock, six thirty, to go work out and run and scream and do PT and pushups and sit ups was not my friend. I was not a morning person back then, and I'm still not a morning person. That’s why it’s so ironic that I would be doing this. ‘Cause now I can get up like four or five o’ clock in the morning and think nothing of it. Any time, get three hours of sleep, five hours of sleep, just keep driving on.
R: Well that’s a perfect segue then. Let’s talk about your actual training that you had in the military.
W: Well, the training always, starting out in college, everything is gradual. They start you out slow. When I first joined, I couldn’t even do a pushup, I couldn’t run; I was not athletic. I think because I felt like there was so many people betting that I could not do it, it made me that much more determined to do it. First time was like, I just could not do a pushup—literally, could not do one. You go through the training and eventually get commissioned, and the things you do when you are in college, they try to instill confidence in you, and yes, you can do it and those types of things. And then, once you get to be a Second Lieutenant, for each step that you have, there is military training you have to do. It’s almost like a little checklist; if you want to get to this rank, here are the things you have to do. So you do those things, you get good assignments; I had a lot of diversity in my career in terms of assignments. I had good write ups, I completed the required schooling—military education and civilian education. Then you just continuously will get promoted. I think also a part of it is, you start out as a Second Lieutenant, and you think, “Oh, wow, if I could ever get to be a Captain one day.” Like, that seems like really big stuff. But then by the time you make it to Captain, you’re like, “I’m not impressed”; “If I could ever get to be Major.” And then you get to be Major, and you go, “Hm, so what? I’m not impressed. Let’s see if I could make Lieutenant Colonel.” So here I am, Lieutenant Colonel, and I’m still like, “I’m not impressed. So what?” But at some point, you have to stop. My husband’s been wanting to have children for the last five years, and I've not really been able to do it because I’ve been really more focusing on my military career, but I’m thinking, and you can probably look at me and tell, I’m kind of running out of time to be having babies. So it’s like, if I’m going to have children, I’m probably going to have to get out the military. Although a lot of people will do both, I’m at that crucial point now where I’ have to make a decision to do one or the other. The fact of the matter is, based on my track record, if I continue to stay in and do everything like I've done, I would get promoted to the next level, so I don’t have anything to prove to anyone. Everybody’s hung up on, “You need to have children, you need to have children.” I’m thinking about it, I’ll just say that.
R: Okay, you heard it here on the camera. What, if any, do you feel was your biggest challenge to overcome in the military?
W: Probably a couple things. The biggest challenge is just the physical stamina. The military is dominated by men, so as a woman, being able to hold your own physically, mentally—it all goes together. Really, what I've found is that if you aren’t in shape physically, it will then cause a level of stress that other people don’t have. Other people may be just worried about getting to that next meeting, writing an op order, or whatever it is they have to do. But if I have to worry about the work stuff and the physical stuff—just being able physically to hold my own. We have a PT test—physical training, physical fitness test, in which you have to do two miles running, two minutes worth of sit ups, and two minutes worth of pushups—pushups, sit ups, and a two mile run. If you have to worry about, “Oh, gosh—can I do the required number of pushups in two minutes, sit ups?” Just the physical part can be troublesome. It turns out that I’m okay, but just the stress to have to work out constantly to be able to maintain that. I always say, the military has been good for me, because if I weren’t in the military, there’s no telling what size I would be, looking at the women in my family. So it forces me—like yesterday, I went running three and a half miles. That’s unimaginable to me at one time that I would volunteer and go out and run three and a half miles. But the fact of the matter is, if I don’t work at it, I won’t be able to pass. I don’t have that stress now like I did when I was younger. An entire company of forty some people go running, and you're running in a group, and everyone’s calling cadences: “When my granny was ninety-one, she did PT,” well I didn’t want to call cadences; I’m using every breath of energy I have just to put one foot in front of the other, and once it’s over with, everyone’s like, “Oh, that was so much fun, and we had a great time,” and for me, I just had attitude; this is not fun to me! But it was because I was so out of shape. That was probably my biggest challenge because it’s a requirement constantly, every year, twice a year, so on and so forth. So finally, I just made the mindset that you can’t wait until the test to get ready. It has to become a part of your lifestyle so that it’s natural and not stressful. And that’s what I've had to do. So that was probably my biggest challenge.
R: You mentioned how it’s mostly men in the military. Can you talk about that a little bit—your experience with being a woman in the military?
W: Yeah. My last deployment that I just got back—I was the only woman, and I was the only person of color at my rank, and it was very stressful. So often, when you're in the military, you think, “Oh, we’re the same rank,” and there’s sort of that instant bonding. But I didn’t feel that this time, and it may be a number of reasons. It may be because I was thrown in with a unit of people I didn’t know, so this was not my own unit; I was what they call cross-leveled. A lot of the people lived in Arkansas, and here I was coming from Ohio, so they didn’t have a whole lot of familiarity with me. And even though we may all have the same rank, a lot of times men—because they're men—just think they're smarter than you or think that because of the job they have in the military—like their job is more important than your job. You know, I’m a human resources officer, so people consider that, I’m a paper pusher. “All you do is office work.” Like, what they do is more important because they're outside, or they’re infantry or whatever their job is, and I find it particularly interesting because there probably over two hundred jobs in the military, and as far as I'm concerned, no one job is more important than the other. Everyone needs to do their job in order for us to work together as a team. So guess what? You might not think much of me being a paper pusher, or you know, the word has changed—human resources is what it’s called now; it used to be called personnel. But guess what? When you have pay problems, or when you want to get promoted, or when you want to get that medal, or you need orders, oh now you want to come see me. Now I'm your friend. Well, we all have a job to do, and so that has been probably one of the biggest challenges: being in a career that’s dominated by men. And the military has also changed quite a bit. When I first came in, men were allowed to say rude and crude things, and it was acceptable. And now, we’re getting away from that. It’s really not acceptable. It’s not tolerated. I want males to see me as a soldier just like everyone else, and not as a female. I don’t want any cat calls, any whistling—treat me just like you do the other soldiers. Address me by rank and last name. I don’t want anyone flirting with me and those types of things. I've been in the military long enough, though, to kind of see that go full circle, if you will.
R: How long has it been, you think, since that started to turn around?
W: Since I’ve been in the military, it’s sort of a gradual thing, but I would say for sure in the last five to seven years, the culture of the military has been changing. They do require training to say, “No, that’s not acceptable.” They don’t allow men to put up the pictures of Playboy magazine, all the little girly pictures. If it’s offensive, then no, you can’t do it. When I was younger, like when I was a Second Lieutenant, I can remember a major constantly just sexually harassing me, and when I told him I was going to report it, he laughed. He thought it was a joke; he was like, “Psh, report it, and by the time they do anything about it, I’ll be retired.” So I never reported it. Nowadays, if someone was doing those kind of things that guy was doing to me, it would be a big deal. They would do an investigation, the whole nine yards. They would take it really, really serious. So yeah, I would say probably in the last five to seven years, the military is really serious. They do take things like that serious.
R: So it’s really been turned around.
W: Mhm.
R: One of the other things you mentioned was the fact that you're a person of color, so talk to me a little bit about that. That, and if that has affected your actual career in the military, but also if you’ve seen that change ___.
W: Yes, it certainly has affected my career. I can remember when I was a Lieutenant at the time. And I've been in the military now, I don’t know, probably through at least two downsizing of the military. I could remember a captain, white male, saying to me, “You're really lucky that you're still in the military. It’s because you’re black and you're female; you're a double minority. So you're still in.” Like, that wass the reason I didn’t get cut, because I was black and female. Now, what you have to know is that in order to be in the military—in order to be an officer, you have to have a college degree. That’s the minimum. This guy was a captain, and he didn’t have a college degree. Hmm. I had my master’s degree. You are at a higher ranking than I am with no degree at all, yet you are a captain. I looked at him, I said, “Let me tell you something, sir,” I said, “The reason that I am still in is because I am great at what I do. If you looked like me, you never would have made it to a captain without a college degree.” And I thought, “When you are white, you get breaks.” That’s what I learned. Because the same rules do not apply to them. Somehow, they were able to still get promoted, rise to the top without meeting the minimum standards, but that was not the case for people that look like me. I don’t know. I can’t really explain it. There’s certain requirements. How did this guy make it past Second Lieutenant, First Lieutenant, and then become a Captain. So now he was being asked to leave the military because he didn’t have his degree, and now he wants to say it’s because of race that I'm still in. I thought, “Guess what buddy? It might have been race that maybe allowed me to get my foot in the door, but you don’t stay in the game if you're not competent and good at what you do.” I was really offended, because of the whole thing about affirmative action, people think that somehow that means that if you are a person of color, you can be incompetent and still keep a job, and that’s really not what affirmative action was all about. Anyways, I would say as a person of color and female, I've always felt like I had to be better than; I could not just do the minimum in order to be competitive. But not anything I was offended by, because I grew up at a very young age knowing, hey if you want to compete with everyone else, you can’t do the minimum. You have to excel and go beyond the minimum in order to stay even.
R: Mhm. I know what you mean.
W: So being female, being a person of color, and one of the other things I noticed in my career—we have what we call evaluations. It’s nothing more than a report card of your performance for the past year or whatever. I noticed that, during my evaluations, that people would describe me in such a way that I could just read it and know that they were sending a message to the committee that I was black. It was like code, and I didn’t like that. For example, people would always describe me as being very articulate. And one would say, that’s not an insult. But for me, it was an insult because I have a Bachelor’s degree in journalism and speech communication, and I have a Master’s degree. I should be articulate. Don’t give me extra credit, bonus points for being articulate. The other thing is my white counterparts were never described as being articulate. So I always felt it was code for, “You speak pretty good for a black girl.” You know what I mean? And I'm like, don’t waste the paper on something so insignificant. Talk about something that’s really important. You know. Just those things, and finally, after I saw it on my evaluation three years in a row, the fourth person, I was like, “Do not say that I am articulate.” It is not a compliment—it just is not. It’s almost an insult because in my mind, I thought, “Well, you don’t expect me to be articulate?”
R: That should be the minimum, at least.
W: Exactly. Exactly. So don’t give me points for doing the minimum. The things that are there, they're so subtle that you almost can’t even say anything about them because the other person in is looking at you like, “Gee, what’s your problem?” So just over the years, I have kind of mellowed, and I just accept people for where they are and who they are. “Okay, sir. Sure. Whatever.” Wearing the patch, the combat patch, is really important to some people. I remember a guy who was the same rank as I was: “Oh, you don’t have the combat patch!” Okay, so what, does that mean my military experience is not as valuable as yours because you do have a combat patch? This guy had a PhD—I forget the correct terminology, but it’s nothing more than PE. He did some things that a doggone tenth grader would know better. It was so funny because here’s a guy who has a Bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD turning his nose up at me because I don’t have a combat patch, and he mispronounced a word on an award. A military award—a very common word that appears on probably ninety percent of military evaluations and awards, and he mispronounced it and didn’t know how it was pronounced. And when all the other Colonels looked at him, and we realized he didn’t know how to pronounce it, we were just like…. And I’m thinking to myself, “You want to look down your nose at me because I don’t have a combat patch, and you can’t pronounce a word that probably an eighth grader could pronounce? Give me a break.” So but anyways, yeah, it’s been an interesting ride, and I will say as the military has changed, though, people have then became a little bit more sensitive because there was one job I got, and I know specifically that that particular boss—he was looking for a person of color. He said he had an all-white staff, and he wanted to attract people of color to the program, and this was in Indianapolis, so there are plenty of people of color. When you have a program, and you’re in a city that has lots of minorities, you look at your program and say, “Gee, how did it get to be all white?” And so he made a conscious effort, and actually not just him, but the military period, just kind of had a movement where they were going to intentionally go after people of color to become army officers, so that’s how I ended up with that job.
R: And how did you feel about that; is that different from—?
W: It was a little bit different. The person that hired me, though, was a person of color; the rest of the staff was not. I think there was also some resentment because people felt like I didn’t go through the regular hiring process that other people go through. So it was sort of a double-edged sword, ‘cause he didn’t stay there forever. Once he left, the new guy that came in was a Caucasian Lieutenant Colonel—was just different. Different. Everything always has its challenges depending on people’s background ‘cause the next guy was a West Point graduate, so they're kind of their own animal in itself. Oh, I’m West Point. Okay, like West Point is better than being an ROTC graduate, so even within the military, people separate themselves—dissect themselves into their own little categories.
R: Do you feel that it made a difference, you knowing going in they were looking for a person of color?
W: For me, personally, it didn’t make that much of a difference. I remember a gentleman having a conversation with me, saying “Oh, you're lucky. You only got that job—“ Here it is, some fifteen years later, another guy says to me, “Oh you just got that job because you’re a woman and because you're black.” And that really hurt my feelings—gee, you really think that that’s all that I’m made of? I went to my boss, Colonel Smith, and I said, “Hey, this other guy—he made a good point. He felt like he should have gotten the job because he had more rank than I did, and he had more experience. How did I get this job?” My last name was Erby at the time. He said, “Erby, let me tell you something. Yes, he has more rank, and he has more experience in the military, but let me tell you what I’m looking for that he doesn’t have. You’ve been here at the university now for at least five years; you’ve worked in higher education; you know how the system works; you know who the players are; you know who the go-to people are. There have been things we’ve been trying to get done in this program for a very long time. You were able to come in and make those changes in no time flat and make it look easy and simple—stuff that we’ve been struggling with. You know the university; you're approachable; you don’t have a problem with going out and talking with students.” He said, “That guy there—when students look at him, they see their grandfather.” He was older, white hair, expects students to come to him—didn’t have the personality to necessarily go out and approach students. He said, “And I need people that certainly, like I said, are approachable, can go out and not sitting in their office waiting on someone to come and see them. Someone that can go out on campus and fit in with the college students.” And because I’m young-looking I guess—I've been told, even when I went to Iraq, people are like, “You don’t look old enough to be a Colonel.” Why say I don’t look old enough? The rest of those cats just look old as far as I'm concerned. But there’s this thing that I look young and I don’t look old enough. Anyway, I kind of lost my train of thought in all that. I just felt like there was going to be someone there that appreciated a different perspective, and the fact that I was different wasn’t going to make me an odd duck out. That difference would be celebrated and appreciated and valued.
R: Let me ask you now—let’s talk about your deployment. How many times have you been deployed?
W: Four times.
R: Can you tell us where and when?
W: 1990 at Fort Benning, Georgia. 1996 and ‘97 to Kaiserslautern, Germany. 2003-2004 to Heidelberg, Germany. And then most recently to Iraq.
R: What were your assignments?
W: All my assignments have all been tied into the fact that I'm a human resources officer personnel. I’m an AG officer, so they were all AG—
R: What’s AG?
W: Adjutant General. AG related—well not all of them. The first one was; I was in, like I said, that particular unit I was with, I worked in the personnel section, so we do a lot of processing people in and out and keeping track of people’s awards and what medals and ribbons they get and that type of thing. The second deployment that I had in 1996-’97, I deployed to Kaiserslautern, what they call K-town, and I worked in a deployment operation cell. So you're working essentially seven days a week, and you're briefing a One Star General, I think at the time. That was really interesting because you're working in a deployment operation cell. If you could imagine, this could be a deployment operation cell: no windows, high security, and you have these briefings that you have to give, and their people—they do a VTC, so video telecommunications type thing. So you may be in a room filled of people, and there may be people from all over—maybe Bosnia, Hungary, wherever—and everybody is tuned into the meeting. This could be really stressful when there is a General at a table in a room full of people, and you go in, and you have to brief. And this was the one time that I thought being black is beautiful. I can get nervous, and I don’t break out in hives, and my complexion don’t change, and all that good stuff. My counterparts—I'm telling you—they would get nervous, and their skin would—I would never forget; I was nervous for them. I think I was more nervous when they were briefing than I was when I was briefing. They would break out in hives, and they would start to perspire. And just seeing their complexion change and the texture and all that, I was like, “Whoo, that’s serious,” whereas, I could get nervous, but I was able to camouflage it a little bit more, so that was a good thing. And then 2003-2004, I deployed again. That time I was a battle captain, again, working in a very similar environment. We were tracking equipment and personnel that was going into Iraq. Some really very long, excruciating hours and that type of thing. The most memorable part of that deployment, I think—aside from meeting my husband; the guy that eventually became my husband—was Shashawna Johnson. She was the first African-American female POW. I remember looking up in the deployment operation cell, seeing her picture and just looking at her, and just the fact that she was a black female, saw myself, and just thinking, “Oh, wow. My gosh. That could have been me.” And just feeling heartbroken. Anyway, later on, I actually met her. She was a guest speaker at Butler University—one of the colleges where I worked. So that was really nice to actually see someone on TV and then eventually meet her later on in life.
R: What does POW mean?
W: Oh, I'm sorry. Prisoner of war.
R: So, what unit were you a member of? Was it the same thing when you were in the reserves?
W: Yes. What unit was I a member of this time?
R: Yes. So then you went to Iraq…
W: Went to Iraq, and I went with this unit here, “Tough ‘Ombres” 90th Sustainment Brigade in north Little Rock, Arkansas. That’s the unit that I was with. Essentially—I think I might have mentioned this earlier—I didn’t really have anything to do with the unit, but because they had holes and gaps in their—I'm trying to civilianize the terminology—
R: Thank you!
W: They had a roster of people required ranks and job specialties that they needed, so they needed someone with my skill set, and they didn’t have it within their unit, so they go to the big army in the sky and say, “Find me a human resources officer that’s a Major.” And boop, Tracy Williams pops up! Before it all happened though, eventually I got promoted. “Oh, I got promoted; I'm no longer an 04.” “That’s okay, we’ll take you anyway,” so off I went. That was the unit that I was with.
R: What was your job?
W: My job there is, I was the human resources—let’s see if I can remember—HROB. Human resources officer branch. I can’t believe I just deployed, and now I'm going brain dead on the acronyms. Essentially, my job was to open and close anything having to with postal, anything having to do with—we had liaison teams at the hospitals, and also to track personnel coming in and out of Iraq in a particular location. So I happened to be in a place called Balad, which was like a major hub for people transitioning in and out of Iraq. It was my job to keep track of those bodies. Human resources is really about accountability. Who’s in the hospital? Who’s on sick call? Where are they? If you have an emergency at home, and your loved one is in Iraq, you might not know where, but my job is to know where that individual is at all times. You could call the Red Cross and say, “My mother’s about to pass away, and I request that my husband come home,” and they can make that happen like that. Those are just some of the kind of things that people in human resources or personnel—what they do, their function, and why they're needed.
R: What was your first impression when you arrived in Iraq?
W: It was hot, hot.
R: And even with that heat, you still had to be in full uniform the whole time, right?
W: Yes. It was extremely hot. I started out in Texas though, and it was hot in Texas—like so hot you felt like you were sucking air through a straw.
R: What month?
W: It was August. It was over a hundred degrees for I forget how many days straight. I thought, “This is good training for, you know, where I’m going.” You can’t even imagine. It might have been a hundred and three, a hundred and five in Texas, but when I got to Kuwait, it was like a hundred and twenty-five, and the temperature just kept going up. If you can imagine being in a hundred and twenty-five, hundred and thirty, hundred and thirty-five degree weather—I don’t think you can imagine it. I didn’t even know the temperatures could get as high as they were. I call my mom. I say, “I've been dropped off in hell, and they're calling it Iraq and Kuwait.” It was hot. The other thing is, you know how we have snow storms? They have sand storms. If you can imagine what it looks like when all the snow is blowing, and we have a blizzard, but imagine that if sand—those little small speckles—oh gosh, it was just… The heat and the dirt and debris and sand just blowing, hitting you. It was just unimaginable. When I got to Kuwait, the other thing that I didn’t like is—you know, we take a lot of things for granted, basic things, like just being able to go to the bathroom. You go to the bathroom, flush the toilet; that’s pretty simple, right? It became a really major, big ordeal for me because in Kuwait, there was not a toilet; it’s just porta-pots, and you could smell them about a block before you would get to them. Imagine, the heat in a porta-pot—you’ve seen a porta-pot before, so you know how small it is. To have to go in there with your gear on. A lot of times, though, the stuff when you’re in full battle rattle, you don’t have all that on, but you have your weapon, and of course, our sleeves are always down, always. Even in the summer, it doesn’t matter. That’s part of the uniform—the boots, everything. So to have to go in one of those and close the door and go to the restroom, oh my gosh. The heat was unbelievable. The heat bothered me so much—they have three meals a day; they had breakfast, lunch, dinner, and then they had four meals. They had a midnight chow. The heat bothered me so much, and other soldiers, that we stopped eating during the day when the sun was up, and we would stay inside because the tents are air conditioned, thank you Lord Jesus. But I would eat midnight chow because it was too hot during the day, and I just did not want to go out. It was just that hot.
R: Were you able to keep hydrated enough?
W: Oh, yes. Now the military, I will tell you, they are really, really good on “Drink water. Drink water. Drink water.” They provide water… look like every few steps. You can find water; it’s not cold often times, but it is water. And they give you these things like camel packs to put on your back, and it’s filled with water. So you're constantly drinking water, but I didn’t want to drink water because I didn’t want to go to the bathroom. I didn’t want to go to that porta-pot that stinks! So yes I drank water—enough just to that I wouldn’t pass out because you also have a lot of heat casualties in that environment, as you could imagine. My first impression of Iraq when I landed is it was hot, dusty, dirty, sandy. Everything’s the same color. You didn’t see any grass. Everything just looks miserable compared to the United States, where we have flowers and grass, and in fact, I saw a patch of grass there, and every time people went past, it was like, “Look! There’s grass!” I mean, just to see grass there is exciting to us because everything is dirt, rocks, gravel. Nothing’s paved. These are the things we take for granted, but the bathroom continued to be an issue. A lot of the bathrooms in Kuwait, you could not flush tissue down the toilet. Our mindset is, my goodness, that’s what a toilet is for. You should be able to flush the tissue down there. Without giving you a long story about it, you couldn’t; I’ll just tell you that. Then when I went to Iraq, you had bathrooms that you could not have a bowel movement in. That’s another special kind of bathroom you have to go to. The simple things become stressful because you may not always know when you have to go that first bathroom that you might have to have a bowel movement.
R: How long were you there?
W: Let me see, my tour was cut kind of short. I ended up leaving there in April. So from August of 2009 to April of 2010, almost May. So not quite, a little less than a year. But, I will tell you don’t feel too sorry for me. I have to say this because if anybody sees this, they’ll go “Ugh!” Because of my rank, where I lived—I lived in a chu, which stands for containerized housing unit. Just imagine the back of a U-Haul truck; someone puts up some panel walls, cuts out a little window, and that’s your space. But because of my rank, I had a bathroom—I had what they call a wet chu. You have a toilet and a sink and a shower in it. So I did not have to walk a block or two blocks like a lot of the other people did. But I don’t apologize for it because I feel like I've paid my dues, so I deserved that wet chu. I was happy about that wet chu.
R: I’m glad that you mentioned the living corners because I was going to ask you, how was that or has that been in all the times that you deployed being a woman? Did you have to room, then, with other women? This time, you had your own space, or did you room with someone in that space?
W: I’m glad you asked that because this is something that the military sucks at. The military is big on fraternization, can’t fraternize, which means it’s not just men and women fraternizing, but same sex. So if I’m an officer, and you're enlisted, we don’t become buddy, buddy and pals and so personal. A lot of times, they keep you separate in terms of living corners. They do that for the men, but often times, they do not do that for the women. They're so big on fraternizing, but they put people in the situation where they're living together, they're showering together, and they're using the bathroom, and they're doing everything together; they can’t help but probably ultimately fraternize if you're not careful, so that’s a double standard that the military has. They say they do it because we’re women, and we’re so few in numbers, so while they have one standard for men; it kind of falls apart, then, when it comes to women. In past deployments, one deployment, I lived in a two bedroom apartment with four women. So there were only two bedrooms—we have two women in each room. We were officers; we were majors. Again, it’s a double standard because I was in the reserves, but the active duty people didn’t have that. If you were a major, you had your own living space, but again, I think because we were reservist, and we were called up, and it was just a short length of time—a little over a year or better—no one really cares. This last deployment that I had—it’s always all so dictated on location and what’s available. I did have my own space—no roommate, there was someone living on the other side of the wall, and we share bathroom. My husband, who’s the same rank as I am, he’s in Afghanistan, but he’s got like three roommates, but the situation in Afghanistan is very different than the situation in Iraq. It really just depends. There’s times where I have roommates, and there’s times that I have not. When I was in Kuwait, I was only there for about ten days—thank you Lord Jesus, once again—but I was in a tent that housed sixty women. You want to talk about I couldn’t wait to get out of that environment? Living with sixty women, and we were sleeping on cots, and there’s probably only about that much space between each cot. One person got sick, the person in the next cot got sick, and it just had a ripple effect. That whole thing about germs and washing your hands—I could “ah-choo” sneeze, and tomorrow you would be sick. And then you sneeze, and then Carla would be sick. I just never had seen anything like it. You're just in such close quarters. Then everyone has their own different personality. Women aren’t what they used to be. These women have foul mouths, potty mouths, would curse—using profanity. There used to be a time that people wouldn’t curse around people who are senior to them; men wouldn’t curse around women; you wouldn’t curse in mixed company; and you certainly wouldn’t curse around anyone that was old enough to be your parent. That is all completely out the window now. Just being in that environment—I had to say to someone, “Excuse me, I really don’t want to hear all that profanity; could you please not curse?” And one female was like, “Pff. This is the army. I’ll work on it, but I'm going to curse again.” Had I not been in uniform, I think I really would have given her a piece of my mind, but I was like, you know what—I only got to be here ten days, just relax. Tempers are flaring particularly when it’s hot anyway, and then people are in a stressful situation. I just decided to let it go—let it ride. Pick and choose your battles.
R: How did you keep in touch with your family while you were away?
W: I wrote, I called, and I emailed. Kind of a combination of things. My immediate family—my parents—writing and telephone, ‘cause they’re not big on email. My husband—initially, he was not deployed; he was back here in Ohio, so it was email, letters, and phone, so everyone, just a combination of those three things.
R: We’ve been talking about you as an officer and a woman and a woman of color, but now, how about what is it like to be the wife of a person in the service?
W: That’s funny you say that because I got married a little bit later in life. I was thirty-eight when I got married, so of course, when I married my husband, we were both officers. We were both the same rank. Remember when I told you about this thing about men thinking what they do is more important?
R: Mhm.
W: It doesn’t change just because they're your husband. While my husband appreciates me, some how and some way, I think that in his own little mind, what he does is just a little bit more important than what I do. We were both majors—I wouldn’t have had it any other way—same rank, but then he got promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. I was still a major, and I was like, “Oh, no! I'm not getting out until I get promoted to Lieutenant Colonel.” So now I'm a Lieutenant Colonel, and I could tell you, just a little bit of me really wants to stay in until I make it to Full Bird Colonel and let him get out so I outrank him when we retire. It works out well because he really has an appreciation for what I do. And vice versa, and because we’re both in, we understand the sacrifice and the importance of that. To give you an example, there are times when things going on with his family—his mother—and they want to, “Well we need to call Eugene, and tell him da-da da-da…” I shield him from that because I know how important what he’s doing in Afghanistan and how important it is that he stays focused—focused and not be distracted by the things that are going on back in the states that you can’t control anyways. A lot of times, when you're a civilian, and you don’t know the military aspect of it, you're so quick to tell your loved one, give them that bad news about XYZ or whatever. So I think with me being in the military, I’m able to be a little bit more sensitive, and also, it helps if anything does go wrong, a lot of times, they don’t have a clue like, “If we want to get in touch with him in Afghanistan, how would we do that?” And because I know the process, I'm able to be effective and to be of help to them, if that makes any sense. So just being dual military, it has its plusses and minuses. I was at one unit, and we both worked for a one star general on staff, and it was interesting that my husband was like, “Oh he’s the G4,” and I was the G1, but no one ever described me as being the G1. The G1 is human resources, so I'm the primary, lead, go-to-guy for that general. And my husband, same thing, if you’re on staff. Well, no one said, “This is Major Williams, the G1.” They would say, “This is Major Williams’ wife.” So I thought that was interesting. ‘Cause I’m like, when he gets introduced, oh he’s the G4, but I'm Colonel Williams’ wife. I’m not his, Colonel Williams’ wife! I’m the G1! You know? No one said, he, Colonel Williams is the husband to the G1. He gets a title related to his job, but I get tagged as being his wife. It irritated me so much I eventually left and took another job somewhere else because I want my own identity tied in with why I'm even there to begin with, which is, I'm wearing this green suit for a reason. I'm not his wife. It was pretty funny because the chief of staff—I would never refer to my husband as my husband—I would always refer to him as Major Williams, Colonel Williams, whatever his rank was, and so for a while, people didn’t know we were married because I was so formal. And there were lots of other Williams. Williams is a very common name; we had like four Williams—two black, two white, a female, a male. So no one ever could make the connection. And when they realized he was my husband, they were like, “Do you always call him Colonel Williams? Do you call him Colonel Williams when you are at home?” And I’m like, “No! But when we’re here and in this uniform and at this unit and duty, he is not my husband. He is Colonel Williams. And that’s how I address him, and I’d like you to do the same.” You know what I mean?
R: Did he do the same when he referred to you?
W: Absolutely. Major Williams, Colonel Williams. Whatever. When we are at work, like I said, he is not my husband, and I am not his wife. So if I have to call him, “Is Colonel Williams there?” And when I leave a message, “Please let him know that Colonel Williams called.” It’s just, to me, about professionalism. Not my husband, and I'm his wife. I just don’t see it that way. So anyway, people thought that was kind of strange, and maybe it was, but that’s just me and my personality, and it works best for me to do it that way.
R: Let’s talk about the time that you spent overseas. Just the actual—where you talked about the climate, and you talked about the environment. Now let’s talk about the actual culture—the people, the food, the local culture. What was your reaction to that and vice versa? Was there a resentment of any kind to having the military there? Did you experience that?
W: No, not at all. Being in Europe period, and being overseas, is almost, in a lot of ways, a breath of fresh air compared to being in the United States. People aren’t nearly as color conscious as we are in the states. They don’t care that you're black. They don’t care that you're a person of color. They do not care, literally. They don’t just give lip service to it, you know? Here in the United States, I am always very aware of the fact that I am a black woman. You go, you apply, check the block. You're always aware of it, but once you go overseas, the Germans, they just don’t care. They are probably more focused on the fact that you're an American, but they don’t see us as being black-American, white-American, so that was really nice. As I got to know some of the Germans, they were very difficult people to get to know, but once you get to know them, they're like a friend for life. I’ll never forget meeting a German young lady; she was in her twenties—very bright to me because she spoke like four different languages. I thought, “I’m really glad that you speak English because I know no German!” I've been to Germany like fourteen times, and I could probably say three words in German: good morning, excuse me, and goodbye, oh, and thank you. That’s it. Americans are—we’re language lazy, I say, because we very seldom want to learn another language, and we expect everyone else to speak our language. That’s neither here nor there, but when I go over there, I'm only there for a year at a time or very short periods of time, and German would have been just too difficult for me to learn. But the food was good. Germany is a very clean country—very, very clean. Very quiet kind of place. I was friends with a gentleman, and I remember him saying, “Why are Americans so loud?” You can go into an establishment, and you always know the table where Americans are sitting because we talk louder than everyone else. The Germans—let’s say this place is a restaurant filled with Germans—I swear they speak at a doggone whisper. You cannot hear individual conversations, whereas Americans, you can hear the person the table or two tables over, and hear their full conversation. That was kind of different. The other thing I remember is getting on the bus and taking transportation. Getting on the bus and someone saying, “You need to walk to the back of the bus,” and I’m like, “Those days are over; I'm not walking to the back of the bus!” But this is because as Americans and being so race-conscious, that’s how it is for us, but there, everyone gets on the bus and walks to the back of the bus because they save the first ten seats or so for the elderly passengers that are going to be getting on later in the route. It’s not printed somewhere; it’s just sort of an unspoken courtesy that all the people do there. And I thought, “Wow, they really respect their elders.” So just the fact that I even thought—I don’t know; my mind went back to the Civil Rights, ‘60s, Rosa Parks, “I'm sitting down in the first available seat on the bus.” But it wasn’t that at all. It was an interesting experience. I will say that is one of those places I probably never would have gone to if the military had not sent me, but I was glad I did. Beautiful countryside, even some of the activities were different that I enjoyed; they had these Volksmarches where you go walking 5k throughout the—it’s like 3.2 miles, and you just walk. It’s a form of exercise. Their refrigerators are smaller than ours; they tend to go to the market a lot more often. Food is more fresh. Just a very different—blowing your horn is illegal unless you really are blowing it for someone to get out the way, but no one will pull up in the driveway and go “err, err!” for you to come out. It’s just a very quiet, just a different kind of place than the U.S.. And they're not the workaholics that we are here either. The downtown, when I initially started visiting Germany, would be closed on a Saturday. Oh my gosh! You mean the mall and the shops are closed on a Saturday? Go figure! Okay, fine. We’ll open one Saturday a month for you Americans—that type of deal because we like to shop.
R: Okay, starting to wrap up, in your entire time that you have been in the service, what was the one thing that you would say shocked you? I guess more when you were overseas.
W: One thing that shocked me was—I've been in the military, and I've had a pretty good career: had never been written up or anything like that, never in any trouble, never reprimanded for anything—but this particular year, I got in some trouble, and I couldn’t believe it. It started over something so minor. I was talking to a young lady in the barracks—this goes back to the fraternization thing because I was an officer, but the person I was talking to was not. The woman I'm talking to is a white soldier; another female comes up, and we’re engaged in a conversation, and she says something about, “Oh, I know this colored gal da-da da-da…” I’m like, colored? This is like 2004 maybe—2005, somewhere in there. I’m thinking, “You mean to tell me that somewhere in the United States, people are still referring to black people as being colored?” So I asked her, I’m like, “Where are you from?” She’s like, “Alabama.” I said, “They still call us colored in Alabama?” I said, “Put your hand out,” and she was like, “No.” “Put your hand out,” and she was like, “No.” So I tapped her on the leg; I said , “We are not colored anymore.” I said, “We’re either black or people of color. Maybe you didn’t get that email, but no one’s using that terminology anymore. Not in this century anyway.” That was it for me. It spiraled out of control the next day. The police came to arrest me. She had filed charges against me for assault. Assault by the military definition is any time you hit or touch someone without their permission, and when I tapped her on the leg like that, that was assault. So the police came, they read me my rights, and I was just like—I couldn’t believe it. I'm giving you the real short version of the story. But I ended up having to call someone to release me so that I would not have to actually be locked up. And it has been on the blotter report, which meant the news got back to the United States in like no time. The general there at the unit where I was, was then notified. Any time you're in the blotter report, that’s like newsflash, newsflash, newsflash! I got written up, and I was like, wow. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, well let me swallow my pill, because she did tell me no, and I did tap her—touch her, whatever—anyways. I did, I only ask them one thing, I said “I'm going to sign my counseling statement, but I just would like to know, did you talk with the other person that was there?” because right now everything is all based upon the female that I tapped. I said, “Did you interview the female that I was talking to?” They said, “Oh, there was another person there?” I'm like, “Yes.” And so they said no. So I said, “I'm going to sign this, but please at least talk to her and get her side of it.” They said they would; now, I’m like, oh my gosh! Because the two of them were roommates. What if the two of them get together? They're both white females; they're roommates. And they give the same version of the story, and then I'm the odd man out. But this is the one time it paid off because they came back to me and said my version matched the other girl’s version verbatim. So it turned out that it did not kill my career, but it very well could have, and I would not be a lieutenant colonel now. So that was probably—I forget, what was your question you asked me?
R: Shock.
W: Yes, shock. That was what shocked me. It was a shocker for me because it was a really big deal. When I went to try to talk to the female, she had a group of men in front of her, and they would not even let me talk to her. I was trying to find out like what was the problem, apologize, something—try and make amends.
R: As if you had abused her.
W: Yes. It spiraled way, way, way out of control, and I could just see the headlines, you know: Black Female Punches White Soldier. I just tried to let it die, let it go, but I learned a lesson. I learned, in the military, just do not touch people. Just don’t. How people receive it could be totally different. So yeah, that was shock for me. I was like, “Assault?” And the fact that my name had the word assault next to it, and I was written up. All my years in the military, I had a pretty stellar record, but anyway, that was it.
R: As we’re wrapping up… you mentioned that, and we know that you moved here from your vacation, and you live in Ohio currently?
W: I live in Ohio most of the time; I'm not living in Ohio now, but I normally do. I'm in Texas now, living in Texas.
R: Why did you feel it was important to be part of this project?
W: First of all, I heard about it through my church, and my church plays a very big role in my life, so any time they make a recommendation, or they send me an email—even though I get hundreds and hundreds of emails—if it’s coming from my church, I will give it a little bit more attention. So I did, and once I saw your email saying what you were looking for, I called to get some additional information. I thought, “Wow, that’s really good,” because so often when you're the underdog, no one ever asks you what you think. So I thought, “This will be a good time.” Even where I work, people are like, “You're going to spend five hundred some dollars to go back blah blah..” I’m like, “Yes?” And they were like, “Well, why aren’t they paying for your ticket? And blah blah blah…” I just said, “You know what? This is something that’s important to me. Because I believe in the project that they're doing, I'm willing to put my money behind it and do it. That’s pretty much it. It was something I had not been a part of, and I thought, this is a chance—a lot of times people complain about, this isn’t right; that’s not right. If you really want to stand behind something, put your time, energy, resources—and if that means a little money, oh well. I figure, you make it for a reason. It wasn’t convenient getting here from Malta, and then I have a trip out tomorrow, but this was really important; I think you all are doing really, really important stuff, and I appreciate the fact that you all asked and allowed me to be a part of this moment.
R: Thank you. Thank you so much. As we conclude, is there anything that you want to state or leave us with that I haven’t mentioned or asked about—kind of a final statement from you?
W: I guess the last thing—two things come to mind as I think about the whole project that you are working on. One is that we all need to get outside our own little comfort zone; there’s some people that have never been out the 270 loop, you know? So if you ever just dare to travel outside that little loop, you begin to realize that not everyone thinks and does things the way we do. We as Americans, we’re kind of spoiled because we think everyone does things the way we do, and once you start to travel a little bit, you realize not everyone does everything the way we do, and guess what? They are happy about not doing everything the way that we do. It’s okay. It’s okay to be different. That’s one theme: that we should celebrate our diversity and whatever form it comes in. And then the other thing is that my military career would never be what it is today and I’d be sitting here twenty-three years later if I didn’t have all these other people encouraging me. Coworkers, neighbors, parents, and so that whole concept that it takes a village to raise a child; there were so many times I didn’t think I could do it, I didn’t want to do it, I wanted to give up, I wanted to get out. But because so many other people believed in me, and was like “Oh, you just hang in there, girl! You just keep going! You can do it!” Like, “I don’t think I can!” But just knowing that other people believed in me, and it didn’t matter what race they were, what age, but most people—I’d say ninety-nine percent of the people that I’ve come into contact with, they’ve been able to encourage me, and some small, some big. All of those things kept pushing me along even though it was something I didn’t really want to do and had no intentions in staying. So I think that’s the beauty of it all that we really never know what impact one person can make on your life. I tell each person, “Do what you can do. Do it to the best of your ability because you never know how much you may be encouraging the next person.” That’s it.
R: Thank you. I said that was the last thing, but now I have to ask you something. I realized that I wanted to—we talked so much about the issues that have come up in your career in the military being black and being a woman and age and all of that, but also, you probably might have had some good mentors that helped you along the way. Did you want to say anything about that?
W: The mentoring, believe it or not, I’d like to see more. I try to do more mentoring now that I'm at the rank that I’m at because I find that the higher you go up, you are able to mentor people. Most of my mentoring did not come from my military people. A lot of my mentoring came from, because I was dual career—military and civilian—most of my mentoring came from civilians that knew nothing about the military. That’s why I was saying, you know, that people don’t realize how much they can encourage you. Because while they may not have known anything about the military, but the challenges that existed in other areas of people’s life, and I was able to take those experiences and apply them, like I said, just transfer them over to the military. Sometimes the military can be a dog eat dog world because each person is trying to outdo, outperform, get that top block, look good in front of the general, in front of the commander, or whomever. That they're not trying to help you. It’s like, trying to move you out the way so that they could get that top block type of thing. I never got caught up in that, maybe because the military was not my only life. You know, I had another life away from it, so my thing was, okay, I’ll do the best I can do, and wherever I fall—because in the military, they're always rank-ordering people, and that gets to be real competitive if you're that type of person. But no, I was just like, I’m just going to do what I can do, and if I get the top block, great, and if I don’t, well that’s fine too. Everyone can’t be that number one slot or that number two slot. Someone’s got to be average; someone’s got to fall in the middle, and if that happens to be where I fall, so be it. But I'm here to tell anyone, you can be average and still continue to get promoted. Just do your job, do it well, and the promotions will take care of themselves.
R: Thank you so much!
W: No problem.